- Anthropic is handing the Agent Skills standard to the AAIF, hosted by the Linux Foundation.
- Anthropic says over 70 platforms already support it, and anyone can contribute.
In short: Anthropic is giving a neutral foundation the standard used to write instructions for AI agents. You gain confidence that what you write once will not be lost when you switch tools.
What changed
- Anthropic is donating the Agent Skills standard, its name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain to the AAIF.
- The AAIF was co-founded a year earlier by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI; the MCP protocol had already been donated to it.
- Anthropic says more than 70 platforms support the standard, including Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code, with 1 million skills published and nearly 280 million installed.
- The standard is maintained by engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and others, acting as individuals.
How it works
A skill is a plain folder with a SKILL.md file (name, description, instructions) and optional scripts. At startup the agent reads only the name and description, and loads the full instructions only when a task matches. That lets it keep many skills on hand at once.
How to read this
The numbers on platforms and installs come from Anthropic, not from an independent count. Anthropic also outlines a plan: versioned releases, a formal change-proposal process and security guidance for people who write and install skills. For now that is an intention. I write about the related standard in the MCP hub.