On 22 October 2026, Anthropic announced that it is donating Agent Skills—the open standard that lets AI agents load specialised knowledge and workflows—to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation. Since the standard was published in December 2025, more than 70 agent platforms have integrated it, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code. About 1 million skills have been published and nearly 280 million installed.
What Agent Skills are
A skill is a folder that contains a SKILL.md file teaching an agent a specific task or domain, along with any scripts or reference material it needs. Anthropic says the idea grew out of work on Claude Code: the model handled general knowledge work well but often lacked the procedural knowledge real business tasks require. Within weeks of the October 2025 launch, developers published thousands of skills on GitHub and wrote loaders for Codex, Cursor, and OpenCode. Anthropic then published Agent Skills as an open standard under its own GitHub organisation and domain so any agent could use it.
Donation to AAIF — the same neutral path as MCP
Anthropic states that it wants Agent Skills to stay open, community-driven, and vendor-neutral. The standard now moves to AAIF, which Anthropic co-founded with Block and OpenAI last year and to which it previously donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The donation covers the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organisation, and the agentskills.io domain. Developers can continue to use or contribute to the standard without joining AAIF.
Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and other companies will maintain the standard as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as Lead Maintainers.
Left, a skill folder carrying procedural know-how; right, an agent workstation that can load multiple specialised nodes — reusable workflows handed to agents (illustration only — no text or logos).
What’s next: versioning, proposals, and security guidance
Anthropic has proposed a roadmap covering versioned releases, a formal proposal process, and security guidance for people who write and install skills. As with MCP, the project will continue to prioritise community input and transparent decision-making. The specification is at agentskills.io; discussion continues on GitHub.
The donation places the “specialised skills” layer of agent interoperability under the same kind of neutral foundation stewardship as MCP, giving cross-platform agent ecosystems a shared, auditable open base for loading task knowledge.
Primary source:
- Anthropic, “Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation,” 2026-10-22, https://www.anthropic.com/news/donating-agent-skills-to-the-agentic-ai-foundation
