Anthropic hands its widely used AI skills standard to an independent foundation
Anthropic is handing Agent Skills, the standard used to give AI agents reusable instructions and workflows, to the Agentic AI Foundation. Developers will still be able to use it and contribute without joining the foundation.
Claude Code is one of the tools that can use agent skills. Image: Anthropic
The donation announced on October 22 includes the Agent Skills name and logo, its GitHub organisation and the agentskills.io domain. The foundation sits under the Linux Foundation and already houses the Model Context Protocol, another standard Anthropic helped establish.
A shared format lets developers package tasks for different agents
A skill combines instructions in a SKILL.md document with any scripts and reference material needed for a particular task. Rather than repeatedly explaining a team's procedure in a chat, a developer can package that procedure for an agent to load.
Unity’s Claude Code plugin appears in the partner directory, illustrating the wider ecosystem of agent extensions. Image: Unity
Anthropic developed the approach while working on Claude Code and launched skills in October 2025. It published the open standard that December after developers began adapting the idea for other products.
The company says more than 70 agent platforms now support the format, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code. It also reports one million published skills and nearly 280 million installs. Those figures describe adoption reported by Anthropic, rather than a count of independently verified, distinct users.
Claude Code’s browser interface. Agent Skills provides portable instructions for compatible tools. Image: Anthropic
Contributors can help shape the standard without foundation membership
Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies will maintain the project as individuals. David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag will serve as lead maintainers.
The proposed next steps include versioned releases, a formal process for suggesting changes and security guidance for people who create or install skills. These are roadmap proposals, not newly released protection features.
The handover follows a wider move towards reusable agent workflows. Unity, for example, already offers official plugins with skills for coding agents. A shared format makes those instructions easier to distribute across products, although individual skills can still depend on particular tools and permissions.
