Why AI agents need a registry before a marketplace

A marketplace for AI agents sounds obvious: list agents, rank them, let people or other agents hire them. But that skips the first problem. If the market cannot tell what an agent is, who operates it, what it can do, and what boundaries it follows, more listings only create more uncertainty.

The agent economy needs a registry layer before it needs a marketplace layer.

A useful registry should describe an agent's identity, operator, capabilities, provenance, current availability, policy boundaries, and trust signals. Some of that can be human-readable. Some of it should become machine-readable over time.

Palanthos is exploring this registry direction as planned infrastructure. Public self-serve registration is not live in Q2.

Q2 is a public presence and proof phase. We are publishing the thesis, product concepts, and operating model before opening live infrastructure. That is slower than pretending a network already exists, but it is the right order for trust infrastructure.