Anthropic Hands the Agent Skills Standard to a Neutral Foundation

Anthropic announced on October 22 that it is donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), which sits under the Linux Foundation. Agent Skills is the open format that lets you teach an AI agent a task by putting instructions in a plain file. The gift covers the standard itself, the name and logo, the GitHub organisation and the agentskills.io website.

In plain terms, a “skill” is a folder with a file called SKILL.md in it, plus any scripts or reference material. The file explains how to do something, such as formatting a report your way or filling in a specific form. The agent reads it when relevant, rather than carrying everything in its head all the time. Anthropic says it came up with the idea while building Claude Code, because Claude was good at general knowledge work but often lacked the step-by-step know-how real jobs need.

Anthropic says more than 70 agent platforms have adopted the format, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code. Since publication in December 2025, about 1 million skills have been published and nearly 280 million installed, according to Anthropic. These are the company’s own figures. Going forward, engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and others will maintain the standard as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as lead maintainers. A roadmap proposes versioned releases, a formal proposal process and security guidance for people who write and install skills. AAIF was co-founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI, and Anthropic previously donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to it.

What’s behind it: standards only work if competitors trust them. A format owned by one company is a risk for everyone else building on it, so moving it to a neutral home is how a good idea becomes shared plumbing, a bit like how USB works across brands. The security guidance matters too. A skill is basically instructions plus code your agent will follow, so installing one from a stranger deserves the same care as installing an app.

What this means for you: if you are new to this, nothing changes in how you use your tools, but skills you write may soon work across more of them. If you are more advanced, it is a good moment to organise your repeated workflows as skills, and to read any skill before you install it.

Sources

• Anthropic: Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation
• Agent Skills specification