Anthropic announced "Agent Skills" (shortened to Skills) for the Claude platform — a modular system of folder-based packages containing instructions, scripts and resources that Claude will load only when relevant to a task.
The feature was announced on October 16, 2025. An update on December 18, 2025 added organization-wide management for skills, a directory of partner-built skills, and published Agent Skills as an open standard for cross-platform portability.
What is a Skill?
- Skills are folders that bundle the documentation, formats, executable code and other assets needed for a specific task. Claude accesses a Skill only when it finds the Skill relevant to the current task.
- The goal is to make Claude more capable on specialized tasks such as complex Excel work, creating presentations, or following an organization’s brand guidelines.
How Skills work and key properties
- Discovery and loading: While working, Claude scans available Skills and loads only the minimal information and files needed for the task, which preserves responsiveness.
- Composable: Skills can stack; Claude automatically identifies which Skills are required and coordinates their combined use.
- Portable: The same Skill format is supported across Claude apps, Claude Code and the API — build once, use everywhere.
- Efficient: Only what’s necessary is loaded at runtime.
- Executable code: Skills may include runnable code for cases where traditional programming is more reliable than token generation.
Availability
Claude apps
- Skills are available to Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise users. Anthropic provides prebuilt Skills for common tasks, customizable examples, and the option to author custom Skills.
- Claude invokes relevant Skills automatically based on the user’s task; manual selection is not required. The use of Skills can be visible in Claude’s chain-of-thought as it works.
- Creating Skills is streamlined: a built-in "skill-creator" guides users interactively, generating folder structure, formatting the SKILL.md file, and bundling resources — without manual file editing.
- Enable Skills in Settings; Team and Enterprise customers require admins to enable Skills organization-wide.
Claude Developer Platform (API)
- Agent Skills can be included in Messages API requests, and a new /v1/skills endpoint gives developers programmatic control over custom Skill versioning and management.
- Skills require the Code Execution Tool beta, which provides a secure execution environment for runnable components.
- Anthropic-provided Skills enable Claude to read and generate professional Excel spreadsheets with formulas, PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and fillable PDFs. Developers can build custom Skills to extend Claude for specific workflows.
- Developers can create, view and upgrade Skill versions via the Claude Console.
Claude Code and agents
- Skills extend Claude Code: installable via plugins from the anthropics/skills marketplace, they are auto-loaded when relevant. Teams can share Skills through version control or manually install them into ~/.claude/skills.
- The Claude Agent SDK supports Agent Skills for building custom agents.
Integrations and partner usage
- Box: Skills teach Claude to work with Box-stored content so users can transform files into presentations, spreadsheets and documents that follow organizational standards.
- Canva: Anwar Haneef, GM & Head of Ecosystem at Canva, said Canva plans to leverage Skills to customize agents and expand what they can do, enabling deeper agentic workflows for teams.
- Notion: MJ Felix, Product Manager, said Skills make the Notion–Claude interaction smoother and faster from question to action.
- Finance example: Yusuke Kaji, General Manager AI, reported that Skills streamlined management accounting and finance workflows — processing multiple spreadsheets, catching critical anomalies and generating reports that previously took a day, now in an hour.
Security and usage notes
- Anthropic highlights that Skills can execute code. While this enables powerful functionality, it requires caution: organizations should prefer Skills from trusted sources and be mindful of security when enabling code execution.
Documentation and getting started
- Anthropic provides documentation, a skills cookbook and Anthropic Academy resources for developers and administrators. Example Skills are hosted on GitHub, and guides are available for Claude apps, the API and Claude Code.
What’s next
- Anthropic is working on simplifying Skill creation workflows and improving enterprise-wide deployment capabilities to make it easier to distribute Skills across teams.
Summary
Agent Skills is a modular, portable approach to packaging expertise so Claude can act as a specialist only when necessary. The capability is available across Claude products, developer tools and the API, but because Skills can run code, organizations should adopt them with attention to trust and security.
