Anthropic Donates Agent Skills Standard to the Agentic AI Foundation

SAN FRANCISCO — October 22, 2026 — Anthropic announced today that it is donating Agent Skills, the open standard for giving AI agents specialized knowledge and workflows, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation. The move transfers stewardship of one of the most widely adopted agent interoperability standards to a vendor-neutral body, ensuring community governance over its future.

Agent Skills, which Anthropic published as an open standard in December 2025, has seen rapid uptake: more than 70 agent platforms—including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code—have integrated it. According to Anthropic, one million skills have been published and nearly 280 million installed to date.

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. Anthropic developed the approach while working on Claude Code, after finding that general model knowledge often fell short on procedural business tasks. Within weeks of its October 2025 launch, developers had published thousands of skills on GitHub and written loaders for Codex, Cursor, and OpenCode.

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 and to which it previously donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The standard will be maintained by engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and other companies acting as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag serving as Lead Maintainers.

Anthropic said the project will follow a proposed roadmap covering versioned releases, a formal proposal process, and security guidance for people who write and install skills. Developers can continue to use or contribute to Agent Skills without joining the AAIF.

The handover underscores a broader industry shift toward reusable, portable agent workflows and neutral governance for foundational AI standards. As with MCP, Anthropic said the project will prioritize community input and transparent decision-making.

Link to the news: https://www.anthropic.com/news/donating-agent-skills-to-the-agentic-ai-foundation