On 2026-10-22 Anthropic said it is donating Agent Skills, the open standard that teaches agents a task through a folder with a SKILL.md file, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, the same neutral home it gave MCP. The donation covers the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain. Anthropic says more than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code, have integrated the standard since December 2025, with 1 million skills published and nearly 280 million installs. Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and others will maintain it as individuals.
Key Takeaways
- ✓Official figure: 70+ agent platforms have integrated Agent Skills, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code
- ✓1 million skills published and nearly 280 million installs so far (Anthropic figures)
- ✓Donated: the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain; you can keep using or contributing without joining AAIF
- ✓Lead Maintainers are David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag, with engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and others maintaining it as individuals
- ✓Proposed first roadmap: versioned releases, a formal proposal process and security guidance for people who write and install skills
Key Decision Metrics at a Glance
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Project Links & Resources
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Background and pain points
Agents handle general knowledge well but often lack the procedural knowledge real business work needs: a company’s release process, the rules for a file format, how an internal tool is used. Anthropic designed Skills while building Claude Code: a skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file plus any scripts or reference material. After the October 2025 launch, developers published thousands of skills on GitHub and wrote loaders for Codex, Cursor and OpenCode, and in December Anthropic published it as a standalone open standard. Control by a single vendor is the main worry for other platforms that invest in a standard.
How it works
The donation hands the standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, which Anthropic co-founded with Block and OpenAI last year and which already hosts MCP. The transfer covers the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain. Engineers from several companies will maintain it as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as Lead Maintainers; Soria Parra said on X that the standard will be steered together with Earendil (PI), OpenCode, Microsoft, Google and OpenAI.
Benchmarks
This is a governance change, not a performance release, so no benchmarks were published. The adoption figures are Anthropic’s own: more than 70 integrating agent platforms, 1 million skills published and nearly 280 million installs.
Getting started
Existing skills keep working unchanged, and you can use or contribute to the standard without joining AAIF. The spec lives at agentskills.io, discussion happens in the agentskills GitHub organization, and proposal feedback goes through the project Discord. The proposed roadmap covers versioned releases, a formal proposal process and security guidance for skill authors and installers; until that guidance lands, review the scripts in any third-party skill before installing it.
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