Standards ·
Anthropic donates the Agent Skills standard to the Agentic AI Foundation
Anthropic has handed the open Agent Skills standard, which teaches AI agents specific procedures, to the Agentic AI Foundation. The company says a million skills exist and more than 70 platforms support the standard.
Agent Skills is an open standard for giving an AI agent specialised knowledge and workflows. A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file describing how the agent should handle a specific task, optionally with scripts and reference material. Anthropic developed skills while working on Claude Code, published them as a standard in December 2025 and has now donated it to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), hosted by the Linux Foundation.
The donation covers the name and logo, the GitHub organisation and the agentskills.io domain. Anyone can use and contribute to the standard without joining AAIF. The foundation was co-founded in 2025 by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI, and Anthropic earlier gave it the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as well. The standard is maintained by individuals from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies.
The figures Anthropic cites point to fast adoption: one million skills published and nearly 280 million installs. More than 70 agent platforms have integrated the standard, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code. These numbers come from Anthropic and have not been independently verified.
The proposed roadmap includes versioned releases, a formal proposal process and security guidance for skill writers and installers. That matters because a skill is essentially an instruction the agent obeys, so an untrusted skill can become a route to abusing the agent.
What it means for companies
For companies this is practical news: the knowledge you put into an agent is no longer locked to one vendor. A procedure for handling complaints or preparing a quote, written as a skill, can work across different tools. When deploying skills, treat them like code: install only reviewed ones and keep a human approval on steps with consequences. The article on AI guardrails for agents explains how to keep agents under control, and our overview of agentic AI covers the basics. If you want such an agent for your business, our custom AI agents start from EUR 5,000 with a fixed price upfront and a free prototype within 3 working days.
Sources: Anthropic: Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation