Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation
Short summary
Anthropic is handing its Agent Skills standard, a folder-based format for teaching AI agents specific tasks, to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation. The goal is to keep the standard open and vendor-neutral, with a roadmap covering versioned releases and a formal proposal process.
- Over 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code, have integrated Agent Skills since the standard was published in December 2025.
- Adoption is large: about 1 million skills published and nearly 280 million installed.
- The standard is donated along with its name, logo, GitHub organization, and agentskills.io domain, and anyone can use or contribute to it without joining the foundation.
Full summary
Anthropic is donating Agent Skills, the open standard for giving AI agents task-specific knowledge, to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation. A skill is just a folder with a SKILL.md file plus any scripts or reference material an agent needs to do a particular job. Anthropic built the idea while working on Claude Code, where it found the model handled general knowledge work fine but lacked the procedural know-how real business tasks demand. After the October 2025 launch, developers published thousands of skills on GitHub and wrote loaders for tools like Codex, Cursor, and OpenCode, which pushed Anthropic to publish the format as an open standard in December 2025. The numbers since are large: more than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code, have adopted it, around 1 million skills have been published, and nearly 280 million have been installed.
The donation transfers the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization, and the agentskills.io domain to the AAIF, which Anthropic co-founded with Block and OpenAI last year. Anthropic had already given the Model Context Protocol to the same foundation, so this is a second piece of agent infrastructure moving into neutral hands. Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and other companies will maintain the spec as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as Lead Maintainers. Nobody has to join the AAIF to keep using or contributing to the standard, which matters for anyone worried that adoption would require signing up with a particular vendor's governance.
The near-term roadmap is concrete: versioned releases, a formal proposal process for spec changes, and security guidance for people who write and install skills. That last item is worth watching, since a skill is effectively a folder of instructions and scripts an agent will run, so installing one from a stranger carries real risk. Feedback on proposed changes goes through the project's Discord, and the spec itself lives at agentskills.io with discussion on GitHub.