Agentic Resource Discovery: Let agents search
We're on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science. Back to Articles a]:hidden"> Agentic Resource Discovery: Let agents search for tools, skills, and other agents. Published June 17, 2026 Update on GitHub Upvote - ben burtenshaw burtenshaw Follow shaun smith evalstate Follow If you build with agents today, you probably know three protocols.
Key Takeaways
- MCP gives agents a standard way to call tools.
- It is a shared standard that any company can implement independently, and that any agent or tool can participate in.
In this post, we'll explore the specification, how Hugging Face has implemented it, and how you can start building on ARD.
- ARD moves selection outside the LLM.
A registry indexes capabilities with richer signals such as publisher identity, representative queries, compliance attestations, and tags.
- The Hub already hosts a catalog of Spaces running Gradio apps, MCP servers, and demos.
Its semantic search supports an flag that returns Spaces ranked by agent-oriented metadata, and Discover translates that search into the ARD specification.
- Many Spaces ship an file describing how an agent should interact with them.
MCP gives agents a standard way to call tools. Skills give agents a way of consuming instructions. A2A gives agents a way to call other agents.
All three assume the user already knows which tool, instruction, or agent they need. The user is still responsible for discovering, integrating, and maintaining those capabilities. The Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) specification is the discovery layer that sits in front of them.
It is a draft, open specification developed by contributors from Microsoft, Google, GoDaddy, Hugging Face, and others, with broad participation across the industry. It defines how agents and tools are cataloged, indexed, and searched across federated registries, so an agent can find capabilities at runtime instead of needing them pre-installed. It is not a product or a marketplace.
For more details please read the original article at Hugging Face.
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