On October 22, 2026, Anthropic announced it is donating Agent Skills, its open standard for giving AI agents specialised knowledge and workflows, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF).
What to know
- Anthropic describes a skill as “a folder containing a SKILL.md file”, plus any scripts or reference material it needs.
- Anthropic says it launched skills in October 2025 and published the open standard in December 2025.
- Anthropic says more than 70 agent platforms have integrated Agent Skills, naming ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code, and that 1 million skills have been published and nearly 280 million installed.
- AAIF is hosted under the Linux Foundation. Anthropic says it co-founded it with Block and OpenAI in 2025, and that it also received the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
- Anthropic is donating the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organisation and the agentskills.io domain. Organisations can use or contribute to the standard without joining AAIF.
- Anthropic’s proposed roadmap: versioned releases, a formal proposal process and security guidance for people who write and install skills.
Why it matters
A skill written once can in principle be reused across the platforms that support the standard, so it is worth learning how to write one. See our guide: How to write an Agent Skill (SKILL.md).
Disclosure: Anthropic’s Claude is one of the tools used to help build this site. We cover Claude models on the same basis as every other maker.
Source: Anthropic. We summarise in our own words; check the source for the full details.