Google and Microsoft, long rivals in cloud and productivity software, have joined Salesforce and a growing list of technology companies to back a new open standard for AI agents, in a coordinated effort to counter the momentum of OpenAI and Anthropic.
The standard, called Agentic Resource Discovery, or ARD, is designed to let AI agents automatically find and connect to tools across corporate software stacks without custom-built integrations. It is being developed under an open governance model with Apache 2.0 licensing and support from a broad coalition that includes Cisco, Databricks, GitHub, NVIDIA, ServiceNow, and Snowflake.
OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have built their enterprise strategies around chatbot-centered products, are notably absent from the initial supporter list. The divide reflects a deeper strategic split: the ARD backers envision a future in which autonomous AI agents operate inside existing software ecosystems, while the leading AI labs are betting heavily on conversational interfaces as the primary workflow.
The companies say ARD uses a federated registry model — described as `ai-catalog.json` manifests — so that enterprises control what capabilities they share and with whom. The approach is explicitly positioned as a lightweight complement to existing agent protocols, including Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol and Google’s Agent2Agent.
There is also a business incentive that runs deeper than open-source cooperation. If ARD becomes the default discovery layer for enterprise AI, software that does not surface a compatible manifest could be invisible to automated workflows, nudging corporations toward the Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Salesforce ecosystems that dominate the backers’ product lines.
The arrangement marks one of the clearest examples of enterprise incumbents aligning ahead of the AI labs, and it arrives as both OpenAI and Anthropic push toward public listings expected to value them in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Whether ARD gains traction will depend less on its technical merits than on whether enterprises continue to prefer one-stop shopping at the cloud giants.
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