Agent Registry
A catalog of known agents, their identities, declared capabilities, and endpoints, maintained so that agents and operators can discover one another without prior configuration.
Why it matters
In a governed deployment the registry is also the inventory. SR 26-2 and the financial services control matrix both treat a maintained inventory as the foundation of model risk management; an agent registry is that inventory for systems that act.
What it is not
These are routinely confused with Agent Registry. The distinctions are not pedantic — each one has consequences for how a system is governed.
A model inventory lists models an institution operates. A registry lists agents reachable on a network, which may include third-party agents the institution does not operate.
Relationships
Typed edges into the rest of the ontology. These are what make the canon traversable rather than merely readable.
| Verb | Target | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
relatedTo | Agent Card | An association too weak or too general for a stronger verb. |
relatedTo | Capability Discovery | An association too weak or too general for a stronger verb. |
Record
| Canonical identifier | QIS-TERM-00003 |
| Status | Canonical industry term |
| Adoption | Emerging |
| Domain · Layer | Identity & discovery · Governance |
| Origin | A2A ecosystem; analogous to service registries in distributed systems. |
| Semantic aliases | None recorded. |
| First published | 2026-08-02 |
| Last reviewed | 2026-08-02 · 180-day cycle |
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