Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation

What it claims

Anthropic is moving Agent Skills, its open format for packaging agent instructions, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation. AAIF is the same body that holds the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Anthropic co-founded AAIF with Block and OpenAI in 2025.

The history, as the page tells it:

• Skills grew out of Claude Code work. In general knowledge work, Claude Code lacked the procedural knowledge that business tasks need.
• Skills launched in October 2025. Within weeks, developers had published thousands of skills on GitHub and written loaders for Codex, Cursor and OpenCode.
• Anthropic published Agent Skills as an open standard in December 2025.

The page names ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code among the more than 70 platforms that have integrated the standard.

Governance

Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies will maintain the standard as individuals, not as company representatives. David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag are the Lead Maintainers.

Anthropic says the project will follow the MCP model, with community input and transparent decision-making. That is a stated intention. The page does not describe voting, membership tiers or how disputes are settled.

How to use it

• No membership needed. Developers can use the standard and contribute to it without joining AAIF.
• Specification: published at agentskills.io.
• Discussion: happens on the project's GitHub organization.
• Spec feedback: comments on proposed specification changes go through the project's Discord.

The page gives no file schema, version number, install command or loader API. The format details have to come from the specification itself.

Limits

The standard has no versioned releases yet. There is also no formal proposal process. Both are only on a proposed roadmap, with no dates.

Security guidance for people who write and install skills is also only planned. The page says nothing about how skills are vetted, signed or sandboxed, even though a skill can bundle executable scripts.

The adoption figures come from Anthropic and have no stated method. These are 1 million skills published and nearly 280 million installs. The page does not say whether every one of the 70+ platforms supports the full format, including bundled scripts and reference files, or only part of it.