Anthropic has handed one of the fastest-growing formats in AI development to neutral ground. The company announced it is donating Agent Skills, the open standard that gives AI agents specialized knowledge and workflows, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation.
A skill is deliberately simple: 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 format while building Claude Code, after finding that general-purpose models often lacked the procedural knowledge real business tasks demand. Within weeks of the October 2025 launch, developers published thousands of skills and built loaders for tools such as Cursor and Codex.
Since Anthropic published Agent Skills as an open standard in December 2025, more than 70 agent platforms have integrated it, including ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot and VS Code. Anthropic says developers have published 1 million skills, with nearly 280 million installs.
The donation covers the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain. Anyone can keep using or contributing to the standard without joining the foundation. Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies will maintain it as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as lead maintainers.
The move mirrors Anthropic’s earlier donation of the Model Context Protocol to the same foundation, and its proposed roadmap covers versioned releases, a formal proposal process and security guidance for skill authors. For developers, the message is clear: skills are now infrastructure, not one company’s feature.
Source: Anthropic
