Anthropic donates the Agent Skills standard to the Agentic AI Foundation

On 22 October 2026 Anthropic announced that it is donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), which operates under the Linux Foundation. Anthropic co-founded the AAIF with Block and OpenAI last year and had already donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to it. The transfer covers the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain. Using the standard or contributing to it does not require joining the AAIF.

A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file that teaches an agent a particular task or domain, together with any scripts or reference material it needs. Anthropic developed the format while working on Claude Code, launched skills in October 2025 and published Agent Skills as an open standard in December 2025. According to Anthropic, more than 70 agent platforms have integrated it, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code, and 1 million skills have been published with nearly 280 million installs.

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 initial roadmap covers versioned releases, a formal proposal process and security guidance for people who write and install skills.