Agent Plugins
An open standard from Amazon, Cursor, Microsoft, OpenAI and Vercel for packaging AI agent extensions so the same bundle works across products.
Agent Plugins is a shared format for packaging add-ons for AI agents, announced in August 2026 by Amazon, Cursor, Microsoft, OpenAI and Vercel. Before it, every product had its own folder layout and install process, so an extension written for one assistant had to be rebuilt for the next. The standard fixes that in the plainest way possible: a plugin is a directory containing a manifest file called plugin.json.
Version 1.0.0 holds two kinds of content, Agent Skills for reusable instructions and MCP servers for connections to tools and data. It deliberately covers only packaging and discoverability, not marketplaces, permissions or how a plugin actually runs. The spec is developed openly on GitHub. Notably absent from the founding group is Anthropic, which created both of the pieces the standard is built from.