Anthropic has officially announced the donation of Agent Skills, an open standard that provides expertise and workflows for AI agents, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF). Since its release in December 2025, over 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code, have integrated Agent Skills.
Interoperability and Simplification of Agent Skills
Agent Skills is a folder containing SKILL.md files that instruct agents on performing specific tasks or domains, along with any necessary scripts or reference materials. These skills were created by Anthropic during the development of Claude Code. While Claude Code performs well in handling general knowledge work, it often lacks the procedural knowledge required for practical business tasks. Within weeks of its launch in October 2025, developers published thousands of skills on GitHub and wrote loaders for Codex, Cursor, and OpenCode. Subsequently, we released Agent Skills as an open standard and established our own GitHub organization and domain name for any agent to use. To date, 1 million skills have been published and installed nearly 280 million times.
Importance of Donating Agent Skills to AAIF
Anthropic is committed to maintaining the openness, community-driven nature, and vendor neutrality of Agent Skills. Today, we donate this standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), which is affiliated with the Linux Foundation and was co-founded last year with Block and OpenAI. We previously donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to this foundation. AAIF will provide a neutral platform for the future development of this standard, ensuring that the community can participate in the future direction of Agent Skills.
“We are donating the name and logo of Agent Skills, the GitHub organization, and the agentskills.io domain. Users can continue to use the standard or contribute to it without joining AAIF.”
Anthropic
Future Maintenance and Community Involvement
Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and other companies will maintain the standard as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag serving as the primary maintainers. We have proposed a roadmap that covers version releases, formal proposal processes, and safety guidance for those writing and installing skills. Like MCP, this project will continue to prioritize community feedback and a transparent decision-making process. Users can join the project's Discord to provide feedback on proposed specification changes.
We thank the developers who have used Agent Skills from the beginning and the teams that have integrated skills into their products. The specifications can be read at agentskills.io, and discussions can be participated in on GitHub.
Source: Anthropic Official Announcement