Anthropic Hands Agent Skills to a Standards Foundation, No Membership Required
Agent Skills, the open standard for handing AI systems domain knowledge and work procedures, is moving to the Agentic AI Foundation. You will not need to join the foundation to use the standard or help build it.
Anthropic announced on October 22 (local time) that it is donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF). Agent Skills is an open standard for handing specialized knowledge and work procedures to AI agents that carry out tasks on their own. What is being transferred: the name and logo, the GitHub organization, and the agentskills.io domain. From here on, engineers from multiple companies and the wider community will maintain the standard together, with the foundation at the center.
According to Anthropic, more than 70 agent platforms have adopted Agent Skills since the standard was published in December 2025. That list includes ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code. The company says 1 million skills have been published to date, with roughly 280 million installs.
A folder that teaches AI how the work gets done
A skill is a folder of files that teaches an AI a specific task or domain. At its core is a SKILL.md file containing the instructions. If needed, executable code and reference material go in alongside it. The approach hands over, in a single bundle, the steps an AI should follow and the material it needs.
Anthropic says skills grew out of its work on Claude Code. It handled general knowledge work well, but often lacked the procedural knowledge that real enterprise tasks require. Within weeks of the October 2025 release, developers had pushed thousands of skills to GitHub. Tools for pulling them into Codex, Cursor, and OpenCode followed. Anthropic then set up a separate GitHub organization and domain to publish the standard as an open one, so other agents could use it too.
Who maintains the standard
AAIF, the new home for the standard, operates under the Linux Foundation. Anthropic founded AAIF last year together with Block and OpenAI, and also donated MCP, the protocol that connects AI to external tools, to the same body. With this donation, Anthropic says it intends to keep Agent Skills an open standard that is not tied to any single vendor, and to let community input shape where it goes next.
Maintenance of the standard involves engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and other companies, participating in a personal capacity. David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag will lead the effort. Joining AAIF is not required to use the standard or contribute to its development.
What changes for people who use skills
Anthropic has proposed versioned releases, a formal proposal process, and security guidance for both skill authors and skill installers as the next items of work. Anyone who wants to weigh in on proposed changes to the standard can join the project Discord. As with MCP, the company says it will put community input and transparent decision-making first.
The announcement moves stewardship of a standard for giving AI agents work instructions — one already in use across a range of AI products — over to a foundation. People who build and use skills can keep using the standard without joining the foundation. What remains to be seen is how the proposed versioned releases and security guidance actually take shape.