Anthropic is donating its Agent Skills open standard to the Agentic AI Foundation, placing its future development under the Linux Foundation umbrella. Anthropic announces in an official blog post that more than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Visual Studio Code, have integrated the standard.
Agent Skills is designed to give AI agents reusable instructions for specific jobs. A skill is a folder centered on a file called SKILL.md. It can also include scripts and reference materials. In practical terms, this lets teams package procedures, domain knowledge, and task instructions so that compatible AI tools can apply them.
This article explains in more detail how you can use skills for your work …
Anthropic developed the approach while building Claude Code, its coding agent. The company says developers began publishing skills and creating loaders for other tools soon after its initial release. According to Anthropic, developers have now published one million skills and installed them nearly 280 million times.
A neutral home for the standard
The donation includes the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization, and the agentskills.io domain. Anthropic says users and contributors will not need to join the Agentic AI Foundation to use or help develop the specification.
The move follows Anthropic’s earlier donation of the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, to the same organization. MCP is another open standard intended to help AI systems connect with external tools and data sources.
Anthropic says engineers from companies including Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI will maintain Agent Skills as individual contributors. David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag are named lead maintainers. The proposed next steps include versioned releases, a formal process for changes, and security guidance for people who create or install skills.
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