Summary
Anthropic is donating the Agent Skills open standard, its name, logo, GitHub organisation and domain to the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation. The company says more than 70 agent platforms have integrated the standard.
Anthropic says it is donating Agent Skills, its open standard for giving AI agents task-specific knowledge and workflows, to the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF). The transfer includes the Agent Skills name and logo, its GitHub organisation and the agentskills.io domain. Anthropic says developers will still be able to use and contribute to the standard without joining the foundation.
The move places stewardship of the standard in a foundation that Anthropic says will provide a neutral home for its further development. Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies are expected to maintain it as individuals. David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag are named as lead maintainers.
How Agent Skills work
An Agent Skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file with instructions for a particular task or area of work. It can also include scripts and reference material. The format is intended to give an agent procedural guidance—for example, steps relevant to a specialised task—alongside its general capabilities.
Anthropic says it developed skills while working on Claude Code, after finding that general knowledge alone was not always enough for practical business tasks. The company says it published Agent Skills as an open standard in December 2025 so that different agent systems could use it.
According to Anthropic, more than 70 agent platforms have integrated the standard, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code. The company also reports that one million skills have been published and that they have been installed nearly 280 million times. These figures describe reported adoption and installations; the announcement does not specify whether installations represent unique users or agents.
Stewardship and proposed next steps
Anthropic says the donation is intended to keep Agent Skills open, community-driven and vendor-neutral. The foundation’s role is to offer a shared home for the project, while maintainers from multiple companies are to contribute in their individual capacities.
The initial roadmap has been proposed, rather than detailed as a completed plan. It would cover versioned releases, a formal process for proposing changes and security guidance for people who write or install skills. These are consequential areas for a format that can include executable scripts as well as instructions: versioning can help users track changes, while security guidance can address risks in creating and using skill content. The source does not give dates for the proposed work.
The standard remains available through agentskills.io, and Anthropic says developers can join discussion of specification changes through the project’s Discord. The foundation’s stewardship will matter as adoption spreads: shared maintenance and a transparent proposal process can help ensure that changes to the format are not determined by one vendor alone.