Anthropic is donating the Agent Skills standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), the Linux Foundation group that already oversees the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The transfer includes the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain. The standard will stay open, and anyone can keep using or contributing to it without joining the AAIF.
A skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file with instructions for a specific task or domain, plus any scripts or reference material it needs. Anthropic developed skills while working on Claude Code, which handled general knowledge work well but often lacked the procedural knowledge real business tasks require. After the October 2025 launch, developers published thousands of skills on GitHub and wrote loaders for Codex, Cursor and OpenCode. Anthropic then released Agent Skills as an open standard, with its own organization and domain, so any agent could use it.
Image: arXiv — https://arxiv.org/html/2605.07358v3
According to the company, more than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code, have integrated the standard since its publication in December 2025. One million skills have been published and nearly 280 million installed. These figures come from Anthropic and have not been independently verified.
Maintenance will be handled by engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies, who participate as individuals. David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag are the lead maintainers. Anthropic has proposed a starting roadmap covering versioned releases, a formal proposal process and security guidance for people who write and install skills.
Image: arXiv — https://arxiv.org/html/2605.03353v3
The donation was announced alongside four new AAIF projects at AGNTCon + MCPCon North America in San Jose. Besides Agent Skills, the foundation now hosts Open Responses from OpenAI, OpenEnv from Hugging Face and OpenSandbox from Alibaba, bringing its project count to ten in its first year.
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