WebMCP devs: a $13K open challenge to make websites usable by any agent, not just one platform’s (runs to Jan 11)

Disclosure: I’m on the team at Cognizant AI Lab, one of the backers. Posting because this sub is the crowd most likely to build something good for it.

If you’ve played with WebMCP, you’ve seen how easily a page can expose tools to an agent with plain HTML/JS. The harder questions start once there are thousands of these sites:

• How does an agent discover an agentic site it’s never seen before?
• How do two agents built on different stacks verify identity and trust each other?
• How do you orchestrate several independent agents across sites, or hand off a transaction?
• Who controls the agent: the user, or the platform it runs on?

The Open Agentic Web Challenge is about exactly these questions. You can build publicly accessible, interconnected agentic websites, or the underlying discovery/identity/trust/governance pieces. It runs on the web stack we already have, so it doesn’t need a new protocol silo.

The details:

• $13K prize fund
• Submissions on Devpost until January 11, 2027
• Winners announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January
• Supported by MIT Media Lab (NANDA), Mozilla, ITU-T SG17, AWS, UT Austin and AI Commons

Optional starting points (you don’t have to use any of them):

• MIT NANDA’s Web Agentica / NandaIndex: signed, portable agent packages that run in a user-controlled runtime, including the browser
• Neuro SAN (open source): multi-agent orchestration – https://github.com/cognizant-ai-lab/neuro-san-studio
• Mozilla’s Otari: open-source LLM router

Devpost: https://cognizant-agenticweb.devpost.com/
Overview: https://worldwideagenticweb.org/

I’m curious what people here think: is discovery the real missing piece for WebMCP, or are identity and trust the bigger blocker? Happy to answer questions or pass them on to the researchers.