Anthropic Hands Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation
On October 22, 2026, Anthropic donated Agent Skills — the open standard behind 1 million published Skills — to the Agentic AI Foundation, a neutral home under the Linux Foundation. Skills already work the same way across 70+ platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code, so what you build now travels everywhere.
On October 22, 2026, Anthropic donated Agent Skills — the standard that teaches AI agents specific tasks — to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a neutral home under the Linux Foundation.
Anthropic co-founded AAIF with Block and OpenAI, and already donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP) there. Agent Skills now joins MCP as a vendor-neutral standard, not an Anthropic-only one.
A Skill is a folder with one required file, SKILL.md, that teaches an agent a specific task or domain, plus any scripts or reference material it needs. Anthropic built Skills for Claude Code in October 2025, then published Skills as an open standard in December 2025 so any agent could use them.
More than 70 agent platforms have added Skills support since, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code. Developers have published 1 million Skills, installed roughly 280 million times.
Anthropic keeps the Agent Skills name, logo, GitHub org, and agentskills.io domain — all donated to AAIF. You don't need to join AAIF to keep using or contributing to the standard.
Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and other companies now maintain it as individuals. David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag are the Lead Maintainers. The proposed roadmap covers versioned releases, a formal proposal process, and security guidance for people who write and install Skills — you can follow or weigh in on Discord.
Two things to do differently now. First, if you catch yourself re-explaining the same multi-step task to Claude every week, write it down as a Skill once instead of repeating yourself every time.
Second, because Skills are a shared, open format, a Skill someone else shares with you could include scripts that run commands. Read the SKILL.md and any included files before you install one from someone else — the same way you'd check any new tool before running it.
Agent Skills — the SKILL.md format that gives agents specific task knowledge — is now stewarded by the Agentic AI Foundation, not Anthropic alone. It already works the same way across 70+ platforms. Your move: turn your own repeated instructions into a Skill, and read a Skill's SKILL.md before installing someone else's.