Anthropic gives Agent Skills standard to the Linux Foundation

Anthropic has announced it is donating its Agent Skills open standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, turning it from a single-company project into a community-governed capability standard for AI agents.

The foundation was co-founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI, and Anthropic has already donated its MCP protocol to it. Agent Skills works like an instruction manual for agents: a folder with a SKILL.md file that teaches agents specific tasks and domain knowledge, with optional scripts and templates. Agents load skills on demand and can reuse workflows across products.

More than 70 platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code, have integrated the standard, with about 1 million public skills and around 280 million installs. The donation covers the name, logo, GitHub organization and domain, and the standard will stay open, community-led and vendor-neutral.