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Anthropic Donates Agent Skills to Linux Foundation

Anthropic Donates Agent Skills to Linux Foundation

AI opensourceagents Anthropic
Anthropic has donated its Agent Skills open standard to the Agentic AI Foundation to foster vendor-neutral governance.
What: The Agent Skills standard, which provides a framework for teaching AI agents specialized procedural knowledge via simple file-based modules, is now managed by the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation. Over 70 platforms, including Cursor and GitHub Copilot, have already adopted the format.
Why it matters: Transitioning proprietary or company-led standards to neutral foundations is a standard play to encourage industry-wide interoperability and prevent vendor lock-in for critical infrastructure components like agent tooling.
Deep dive
  • Agent Skills simplify agent workflows using a folder structure with a SKILL.md file and associated scripts.
  • The standard originated from development work on Claude Code.
  • 1 million skills have been published to date, with 280 million installations.
  • The donation includes the agentskills.io domain, GitHub organization, and branding.
  • Governance will now shift to community-driven processes with lead maintainers David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag.
Decoder
  • Agent Skills: A standardized way for AI agents to acquire and execute domain-specific procedures or workflows defined by structured documentation and scripts.
  • Vendor-neutral: A governance model where no single company controls the direction, maintenance, or licensing of a standard or technology.
Original article

Today, we’re donating Agent Skills, the open standard that gives AI agents specialized knowledge and workflows, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF). More than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code, have integrated Agent Skills since we published the standard in December 2025.

Agent interoperability through simplicity

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. We developed skills while working on Claude Code. It handled general knowledge work well, but often lacked the procedural knowledge that real business tasks need. Within weeks of our October 2025 launch, developers published thousands of skills on GitHub and wrote loaders for Codex, Cursor, and OpenCode. We then published Agent Skills as an open standard, under its own GitHub organization and domain, so any agent could use it. So far, 1 million skills have been published and nearly 280 million installed.

Donating Agent Skills to AAIF

We’re committed to keeping Agent Skills open, community-driven, and vendor-neutral. Today, we are donating the standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, which we co-founded with Block and OpenAI last year, and to which we donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The AAIF will provide a neutral home to the standard going forward, ensuring the community has a say in where Agent Skills go next.

We are donating the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization, and the agentskills.io domain. You can continue to use the standard or contribute to it without joining the AAIF.

Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and other companies will maintain the standard as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as Lead Maintainers.

What comes next

We’ve proposed starting with a roadmap covering versioned releases, a formal proposal process, and security guidance for people who write and install skills. As with MCP, the project will continue to prioritize community input and transparent decision-making. You can join the project’s Discord to give feedback on proposed specification changes.

Thank you to the developers who built with Agent Skills from the start, and to the teams who brought skills into their products. Read the specification at agentskills.io and join the discussion on GitHub.

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