Anthropic hands its widely used AI skills standard to an independent foundation
Anthropic is handing Agent Skills, a shared standard for giving AI agents instructions and reusable workflows, to the Agentic AI Foundation. Developers will still be able to use the standard and help improve it without joining the foundation.
Claude Code is one of the tools that can use Agent Skills. Image: Anthropic
The donation announced on October 22 includes the Agent Skills name and logo, its GitHub organization, and the agentskills.io website domain. The foundation is part of the Linux Foundation. It already looks after the Model Context Protocol, another standard that Anthropic helped create.
A shared format lets developers prepare tasks for different AI agents
A skill brings together instructions in a document called SKILL.md, along with any scripts and reference materials needed for a particular task. Instead of explaining the same team process in a chat over and over, a developer can save the steps in a package that an AI agent can load and follow.
Unity's Claude Code plugin appears in the partner directory, showing the growing range of extensions for AI agents. Image: Unity
Anthropic developed this approach while working on Claude Code and launched skills in October 2025. In December 2025, it published the format as an open standard after developers began adapting the idea for other products.
Anthropic says more than 70 AI agent platforms now support the format, 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 numbers come from Anthropic's reports. They do not represent an independently checked count of different users.
Claude Code's browser interface. Agent Skills provides reusable instructions for tools that support the format. Image: Anthropic
People can help shape the standard without joining the foundation
Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and other companies will help maintain the project as individuals. David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag will lead the maintenance work.
The proposed next steps include numbered versions of the standard, a formal way to suggest changes, and security advice for people who create or install skills. These are plans for the future, not security features that have already been released.
The handover is part of a wider move towards AI agents using workflows that can be reused across different tools. For example, Unity already offers official plugins that include skills for AI coding agents. A shared format makes these instructions easier to share across products, although some skills may still rely on specific tools and permissions.