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AI agents may soon search for and use their own tools at runtime, thanks to a new open standard backed by Microsoft and Google.
I'm always a bit nervous when a (oh, heck, I'm gonna say it) cabal of giant corporations that are normally fierce rivals starts working together on a project.
This time, Google, Microsoft, GoDaddy, Hugging Face, NVIDIA, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Databricks, Snowflake, GitHub, and Cisco are all announcing a new standard called Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD), an open specification for publishing, discovering, and verifying AI capabilities across the web. Google and Microsoft both have blog posts announcing the partnership.
Also: Apple, Google, and Microsoft join Anthropic's Project Glasswing to defend world's most critical software
Last time we had something this big, it was the Project Glasswing announcement, which brought together 12 giant rivals that intended to use Anthropic's highly restricted Mythos AI model to find and fix cybersecurity infrastructure vulnerabilities. As we've been following for the past few days, Mythos (and its neutered little buddy Fable) have been, uh, inferencus interruptus by the US government.
I find it particularly interesting to note that the ARD announcement does not include either OpenAI or Anthropic among the participating partners.
Beyond our rogues' gallery of partners, why is this such an important announcement? Let's dig in.