Anthropic Donates Agent Skills Standard to the Agentic AI Foundation
Anthropic has donated its Agent Skills standard, name, logo, GitHub organization, and domain to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation.
Quick answer
What did Anthropic announce about Agent Skills?
Anthropic donated its Agent Skills open standard to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, transferring the name, logo, GitHub organization, and agentskills.io domain. Anthropic says more than 70 platforms have integrated the standard and 1 million skills have been published since its December 2025 release.
Key takeaways
- Anthropic donated the Agent Skills standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a Linux Foundation project it co-founded with Block and OpenAI.
- The donation includes the Agent Skills name and logo, its GitHub organization, and the agentskills.io domain.
- Anthropic says more than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code, have integrated Agent Skills since the standard was published in December 2025.
- Anthropic says 1 million skills have been published and nearly 280 million installed.
- Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and other companies will maintain the standard as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag named as Lead Maintainers.
Anthropic said it is donating Agent Skills, the open standard it created for giving AI agents specialized knowledge and workflows, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a project hosted under the Linux Foundation.
The donation covers the Agent Skills name and logo, its GitHub organization, and the agentskills.io domain. Anthropic said the AAIF will serve as a neutral home for the standard going forward and that the community will have a say in its future direction. Anthropic said developers and companies can continue using or contributing to the standard without joining the AAIF.
What Agent Skills is
Anthropic said a skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file that teaches an agent how to perform a specific task or operate in a particular domain, along with any scripts or reference material the task requires. According to the company, it developed skills while building Claude Code, after finding that the tool handled general knowledge work well but often lacked the procedural knowledge needed for real business tasks.
Anthropic said it launched skills in October 2025, and that within weeks developers had published thousands of skills on GitHub and written loaders for other agent platforms, including Codex, Cursor, and OpenCode. The company said it then published Agent Skills as an open standard in December 2025, under its own GitHub organization and domain, so that any agent platform could adopt it.
Adoption figures
Anthropic said more than 70 agent platforms have integrated Agent Skills since the standard's publication, naming ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code as examples. The company said 1 million skills have been published in total and that they have been installed nearly 280 million times.
Governance under the AAIF
Anthropic said the AAIF is a Linux Foundation project it co-founded alongside Block and OpenAI, and that it previously donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the same foundation. The company said engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and other companies will maintain the Agent Skills standard going forward, acting as individuals rather than as company representatives. Anthropic named David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as the project's Lead Maintainers.
Roadmap
Anthropic said it has proposed a roadmap for the project that includes versioned releases, a formal proposal process, and security guidance for people who write and install skills. The company said that, as with MCP, the project will continue to prioritize community input and transparent decision-making. Anthropic pointed developers to the project's Discord server for feedback on proposed changes to the specification, and said the full specification is available at agentskills.io with further discussion on GitHub.
Anthropic thanked the developers who built with Agent Skills from its early release and the teams that incorporated skills into their products.
Source: Anthropic, "Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation," published October 22, 2026.
Frequently asked questions
- What is Agent Skills?
- According to Anthropic, Agent Skills is an open standard built around a skill folder containing a SKILL.md file that teaches an AI agent a specific task or domain, along with any scripts or reference material it needs.
- Who will maintain Agent Skills now?
- Anthropic says engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and other companies will maintain the standard as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag serving as Lead Maintainers.
- What is the Agentic AI Foundation?
- Anthropic describes the AAIF as a project under the Linux Foundation that it co-founded with Block and OpenAI, and to which it previously donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
- What happens to Agent Skills next?
- Anthropic says it has proposed a roadmap covering versioned releases, a formal proposal process, and security guidance for people who write and install skills, and that the project will prioritize community input.