Anthropic Donates Agent Skills Standard to Linux Foundation AI Group

Anthropic announced Oct. 22 that it is donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), moving stewardship of the open format to a group under the Linux Foundation that will guide its future development.

More than 70 agent platforms have integrated Agent Skills. Developers have published 1 million skills, and the format has recorded nearly 280 million installations.

A skill consists of a folder with a SKILL.md instruction file and may include scripts or reference material. Those files give an AI agent guidance for a particular task or field.

Anthropic began developing Agent Skills while working on Claude Code, after finding that general model knowledge did not always cover procedural business tasks. Developers published thousands of skills on GitHub within weeks of the format’s October 2025 launch. Loaders were written for Codex, Cursor and OpenCode. Anthropic later published the format as an open standard under its GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain for use by other agents.

ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code are among the platforms that have adopted the standard. The donation covers the Agent Skills name and logo, its GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain.

Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies will maintain the standard in their individual capacities. David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag are the lead maintainers. Developers can use or contribute to Agent Skills without joining the foundation.

Anthropic proposed a roadmap covering versioned releases, a formal process for proposing changes and security guidance for people who write or install skills. The proposal outlines the initial areas for the foundation’s work on the standard.