On October 22, 2026, Anthropic announced it is donating Agent Skills, the open standard for packaging agent capabilities, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), which operates under the Linux Foundation. Agent Skills defines a simple, interoperable format that lets AI agents load and use domain-specific knowledge and workflows.
What is Agent Skills?
A skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file that instructs an agent about a specific task or domain and may include scripts or reference materials. Anthropic says the format was developed while working on Claude Code: general knowledge handling worked well, but the system often lacked the procedural knowledge needed for real business tasks.
Anthropic first published the standard in December 2025 under its own GitHub organization and domain so any agent could adopt it. Following an October 2025 launch, developers published thousands of skills on GitHub within weeks and created loaders for Codex, Cursor, and OpenCode. To date, about 1 million skills have been published and nearly 280 million installations recorded.
What is being transferred to the AAIF?
Anthropic said it wants Agent Skills to remain open, community-driven, and vendor-neutral. As part of that commitment it is transferring the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization, and the agentskills.io domain to the Agentic AI Foundation. Anthropic was a co-founder of the AAIF alongside Block and OpenAI last year, and previously donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the same foundation.
Maintenance of the standard will continue with engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and other companies participating as individuals. David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag will serve as Lead Maintainers.
Next steps
Anthropic has proposed an initial roadmap that includes versioned releases, a formal proposal process, and security guidance for authors and consumers of skills. As with MCP, the project will prioritize community input and transparent governance. Feedback on proposed specification changes can be provided via the project’s Discord, and the specification and discussions will remain on GitHub.
Anthropic thanked the developer community and the teams that integrated skills into their products, and encouraged interested parties to read the specification at agentskills.io and join the GitHub discussion.
