On October 22, 2026, Anthropic said it is donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation. The page calls it an open standard that gives agents specialized knowledge and workflows. Since the standard was published in December 2025, more than 70 agent platforms have integrated it. The names on the page include ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code. The image is the Anthropic name on the announcement page, not a photograph of an event.

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The Anthropic name as shown on the announcement page
The Anthropic name used on the announcement page. Image source: Anthropic, Anthropic

The page defines a skill as a folder with a SKILL.md file that teaches an agent a specific task or domain, plus any scripts or reference material it needs. The company says skills took shape while it was building Claude Code. Claude Code handled general knowledge work, but often lacked the procedural knowledge real business tasks need. Within weeks of an October 2025 launch, developers published thousands of skills on GitHub and wrote loaders for Codex, Cursor, and OpenCode. Anthropic then published Agent Skills as an open standard, under its own GitHub organization and domain. The page says 1 million skills have been published and nearly 280 million have been installed.

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The donation sends the standard to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation. The page says Anthropic co-founded that foundation last year with Block and OpenAI, and donated the Model Context Protocol to it as well. The company says the point is to keep the standard open, community-driven, and vendor-neutral. What is being given over is the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization, and the agentskills.io domain. The page says people can keep using the standard or contributing to it without joining the foundation.

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Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and other companies will maintain the standard as individuals. The page names David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as lead maintainers. The proposed roadmap starts with versioned releases, a formal proposal process, and security guidance for people who write and install skills. That is a proposal. The page does not say the guidance is already a set of rules that can be enforced. As with the Model Context Protocol, the page says the project will keep putting community input and open decisions first. Discord and GitHub are the channels it offers. The page does not list all of the 70-plus platforms.

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