ATLANTA — Solo.io, the cloud native application networking company, has added another open source tool to the rapidly expanding agentic AI ecosystem.Idit Levine, the company’s founder and CEO, announced its donation of agentregistry here during a keynote address Tuesday at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America.The project is the third open source project Solo.io has introduced since March aimed at building connective tissue for agentic AI infrastructure. Kagent, an open source framework for Ai agents running in Kubernetes, was first out of the gate, followed by agentgateway, an AI native proxy. Both projects were donated to the Linux Foundation.Agentregistry is a centralized, curated open source registry for AI applications and artifacts, intended as a “single source of truth” for organizations that use agents. The project also supports Agent Skills.Introduced last month by Anthropic, Agent Skills are folders that contain re-usable instructions, resources and scripts that can be loaded into an agent as needed; they’re intended to help agents improve their ability to perform their designated tasks.The new agentregistry project, along with the ones that preceded it, are part of a larger response to the AI boom and the challenges organizations are facing in bringing AI agents to production, Levine told The New Stack.“We have a lot of customers reaching out to us, a lot of people from the community,” she said. “And the two things that people always ask [about] is, No. 1, agentgateway, because they need it for security of the [Model Context Protocol], and the second one, a registry.”Customers are interested in an agent registry, she said, because they need “something that they trust, of what they allow their people inside the organization to use, in terms of models, in terms of agents, that they’re good in terms of MCP. So that’s exactly what we created.”What Does the Agentregistry Include?Agentregistry, she said, took inspiration from the official MCP registry. The Solo.io project allows users to import data from any registry.“We bring in more data, like GitHub stars for a security vulnerability check and so on,” Levine said. “And then the admin or the registry operator can look at it and decide what he wants. It’s giving him a score. And then he can choose and decide to import it to his private registry.”The project allows users to curate a public or private registry. “And we also built a great runtime to be able to run it locally,” Levine added.Agent Skills, she said, are “trying to solve a few problems that exist with MCP. The first one is the composability.”For instance: Say you go to Google Drive to take notes on a meeting, and then want an agent to attach that file to a Salesforce Business Development Representative. Without Agent Skills, Levine said, the process involves going to the Google Drive, bringing back the file, and calling the agent’s large language model — an expensive and largely unnecessary step.But with Agent Skills, “they make it like a workflow that, instead of sending it to the agent … you can run a script that’s saying, ‘First go here, then bring it to here.’ So now the agent can basically call that skill that will do all that work … they are basically not involving the LLM, because it’s not a big deal. We don’t need it. So that’s what ‘composable’ means in terms of [being] context efficient.”An Advantage in InnovationWhy has Solo.io moved so quickly to start building ways to connect AI agents and open source its solutions? “It’s just the advantage that we have,” Levine said.She elaborated: “There’s a lot of startups that are trying to build businesses right now, but they don’t have a lot of credibility, right? When you bring in something like this [agentregistry], you want to know that the people know to do the thing.”And larger companies aren’t as nimble as startups — or, for that matter, one the size of Solo.io, which in 2021 reported a valuation of $1 billion.“I feel we are just in the sweet spot,” she said. Solo.io’s customers, for which it runs service mesh and gateways at scale, already trust it. “It’s giving us a very nice kind of like place to do real work, not just innovation, but real stuff that working in production, because we know what we need to build.”To get involved with agentregistry:Check out the project site.Contribute via GitHub.Join the #agentregistry discussion in Discord.The post Solo.io Open Sources Agentregistry, With Support for Agent Skills appeared first on The New Stack.