The Agent Skills Will Be an Open Standard, Community-Driven, and Vendor-Neutral

Anthropic announced it is donating Agent Skills, the open standard that gives AI agents specialized knowledge and workflows, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, ensuring the tool remains open, community-driven, and vendor-neutral. Since the San Francisco company published the standard in December 2025, over 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code, have integrated Agent Skills. So far, 1 million skills have been published and nearly 280 million installed. A skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file that teaches an agent a specific task or domain, along with any scripts or reference material it needs. Anthropic developed skills while working on Claude. Within weeks of the launch, developers published thousands of skills on GitHub and wrote loaders for Codex, Cursor, and OpenCode. The donation involves the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization, and the agentskills.io domain. Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and other companies will maintain the standard as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as Lead Maintainers. Developers can join the project’s Discord to give feedback on proposed specification changes. Last year, Anthropic donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the AAIF.

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NVIDIA Released 'Nemotron 3.5 Super VL', Which Powers Persistent, Multimodal Agents

NVIDIA released Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, a 120-billion-parameter open-source model that the company said can work across PDFs, charts, tables, images, and webpages while following instructions and using tools. It's a customizable multimodal system for specialized workflows, with a 120B-parameter mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture that activates 12B parameters per token, balancing model capacity with inference efficiency. It comes with always-on agents designed for taking on longer, more complex enterprise workflows. The model combines reasoning, instruction following, and tool use with text, image, document, and video understanding. Coding: Test and validate code, analyze errors, and recommend fixes. Web research: Search across websites, connect information, and verify answers. Document intelligence: Extract information from tables, charts, and page layouts to produce summaries and reports. Cybersecurity: Identify security vulnerabilities and triage threats to prioritize remediation. Video understanding: Extract information for search, content review, and incident analysis. By combining these capabilities into a single model, teams can handle text and visual tasks without deploying separate text and vision-language models or passing task context between them. For example, a single request can involve reading a document, checking information across sources, following company policy, and calling several tools. Another example, before producing a useful answer, can be reviewing a credit agreement to extract figures from tables, interpret a chart, check a related webpage, and apply the company’s own rules. On a single GPU, this model delivers up to 5x higher throughput for agentic tasks compared to other open models in its size category. Developers can post-train Nemotron 3.5 Super VL with NVIDIA NeMo using their own data, tools, policies, and workflows. This model was also optimized to run locally on NVIDIA DGX Spark. Several NVIDIA partners supported customization and deployment of Nemotron 3.5 Super VL for domain-specific workflows. AfterQuery AgileRL AI21 Alice Applied Compute Baseten Bespoke Labs Databricks distil labs Fastino Labs Fireworks AI Handshake Mercor Mindbeam ms-swift Multiverse Computing Prime Intellect Reasonable River AI Scale AI Thinking Machines Lab (Tinker) TNG Trajectory Inference software Actual Computer Canonical Exo LM Studio Ollama SGLang Unsloth vLLM Harnesses and agent frameworks Aible Cline Hermes Agent Kilo Code LangChain LM Studio Bionic OpenClaw OpenCode OpenHands Pi Cloud platforms Amazon SageMaker JumpStart Google Cloud Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform MSFT Foundry OCI Enterprise AI Global systems integrators HCLTech Infosys Tata Consultancy Services Thoughtworks Hardware and infrastructure Dell HPE Services Red Hat AI natives APMIC Cognition Daily Domyn Dream Eon Factory AI H Company Harvey Inflection AI Navan NextLM NYB.AI Orca Security Perplexity Ramp Terray Two Delta Versos Hosted inference service providers Baseten Bitdeer AI BLACKBOX.AI CoreWeave Crusoe DeepInfra DigitalOcean fal.ai Fireworks AI FriendliAI GMI Cloud Lambda Modal Nebius Nscale Together AI

Character.AI Filed for Bankruptcy After Lawsuits Alleging Its Chatbots Harmed Children

High-profile AI startup Character.AI filed for bankruptcy last week, with the goal of reaching a global resolution of all legal claims it received, including lawsuits alleging the company's chatbots pushed children to suicide and self-harm. Character.AI also said it agreed to sell some assets to Walt Disney for $20 million. US states had sued the company multiple times, with Kentucky alleging that its chatbots encouraged users to cut, starve, or kill themselves and Pennsylvania alleging its chatbots posed as doctors. Character.AI reached preliminary settlements in five private lawsuits in January. ⁠However, recent court documents from those five cases indicated that the settlements had not yet been finalized or paid. Two former Google employees founded Character.AI in 2021. In 2024, Google licensed Character.AI's technology and rehired the founders. The company has not been profitable, despite having roughly 12 million active users. ⁠It was operating at a loss of approximately $8 million to $9 million per month, according to court documents filed in the Wilmington, Delaware, bankruptcy court. Character Technologies, its US-based owner, listed estimated assets and liabilities of between $50 million and $100 million, according to a court filing. The platform will continue to operate during the bankruptcy, but may be shut down if it can't find a buyer, the company said.  

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Microsoft Starts Shipping Its Surface Laptop Built for Local AI

Microsoft plans to start shipping its Surface Laptop Ultra built for local AI and 3D graphics and powered by the NVIDIA RTX SparkTM Superchip on October 16 at $2,599, This is Microsoft’s most expensive and most powerful Surface PC ever made, designed for intensive AI developer workloads, such as running large 120B-parameter models locally, enabling complex agentic AI workloads and experiences. The NVIDIA RTX Spark Superchip combines NVIDIA AI, Blackwell RTX graphics, up to a 20-core NVIDIA Grace CPU, and up to 128 GB of unified memory to deliver serious performance. The Surface Laptop Ultra is the world's first laptop to feature a breakaway USB-C port, similar to Apple's MagSafe and its own Surface Connect. The breakaway cable design means if you ever trip over the cable while the laptop is plugged in, it won't yank the entire laptop off your desk. The laptop allows prototype agents, review code, and test larger models while dev tools keep running. NVIDIA CUDA accelerates AI workloads, including local agent workflows powered by models up to 120B parameters.

Spotify Expands Its AudioBook Access Worldwide

With the goal of competing more effectively with music streaming providers and audiobook apps like Audible, Spotify announced that it’s expanding audiobook access to 750 in 180 markets worldwide, in 120 languages, far beyond the existing English-speaking regions. The audio platform has more than 350,000 titles and is working with more than 300 publishers worldwide, including Planeta and Mondadori, to increase the number of titles available in different markets. With a Premium subscription, users can listen to 12 hours of audiobooks in eligible countries With an Audiobook+ stand-alone subscription, users get access to titles with a 15-hour allowance. Alternatively, users can buy individual titles directly. Since its launch last year, Audiobook+ has gained over 1 million subscribers and has fetched over 100 million in annual recurring revenue for the platform. In February, the company launched a “Page Match” feature, which lets users scan a page of a physical book and find the corresponding point in the audiobook to listen to. Since the launch, 1 million people have been using the feature monthly, the company noted. Spotify said that over the last year, monthly audiobook listeners grew by 40% and listening hours increased by 30%. This year, the company introduced Audiobook Charts to let people discover popular titles. It also launched an AI-powered tool that lets authors turn their books into audiobooks using models from ElevenLabs. Plus, Spotify began experimenting with physical book sales through its audiobook platform in select markets such as the U.S. and the U.K.

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The AI-Native University

Blueprint for the Institution of the Future

A practical guide for leaders reimagining higher education with AI at the core — not as an add-on, but as the foundation for how students learn, faculty teach, and institutions govern.

By Mikel Amigot

Read the book