Anthropic donates Agent Skills to the AAIF

What changed

Anthropic announced (Anthropic) that it is donating the Agent Skills standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF). The foundation sits under the Linux Foundation. Anthropic co-founded it with Block and OpenAI last year and had already donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to it.

The donation covers the name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain. Anyone can keep using the standard, and contributing does not require joining the AAIF.

What Agent Skills is

A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file that teaches an agent a specific task or domain, along with any scripts or reference material it needs. Anthropic built it while working on Claude Code, which handled general knowledge work well but often lacked the procedural knowledge real business tasks need.

According to Anthropic, within weeks of the October 2025 launch developers had published thousands of skills on GitHub and written loaders for Codex, Cursor and OpenCode. The open standard followed in December 2025. Since then more than 70 agent platforms have integrated it, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code. The company says 1 million skills have been published and installs are nearing 280 million.

Who maintains it

Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies will maintain the standard as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as lead maintainers.

The proposed first roadmap covers versioned releases, a formal proposal process and security guidance for people who write and install skills. Feedback on specification changes goes through the project's Discord.

Why it matters

For anyone writing skills, this means stability: the format is now owned by a neutral foundation rather than a model vendor, just like MCP. The security guidance is especially welcome, since an installed skill can run scripts inside the agent's environment.

The specification is at agentskills.io, and discussion happens on the project's GitHub.