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

IBL News | New York

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.