Anthropic donates Agent Skills to Linux Foundation
Anthropic is handing Agent Skills, an open standard already adopted by more than 70 agent platforms, to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation, giving it the same vendor-neutral home as MCP.
Anthropic announced that it is donating Agent Skills, its open standard for giving AI agents specialized knowledge and workflows, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF). The AAIF sits under the Linux Foundation. Anthropic co-founded it with Block and OpenAI last year and has already donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to it.
A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file that teaches an agent a specific task or domain, plus any scripts or reference material the task needs. Anthropic built skills while working on Claude Code and launched them in October 2025. It published Agent Skills as an open standard in December 2025. The company says more than 70 agent platforms have since integrated it, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code. It also says 1 million skills have been published and nearly 280 million installed.
The donation covers the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain. Developers can use the standard or contribute to it without joining the AAIF.
Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies will maintain the standard as individuals. David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag will serve as Lead Maintainers.
Anthropic has proposed a first roadmap covering versioned releases, a formal proposal process, and security guidance for people who write and install skills. Feedback on proposed specification changes will go through the project's Discord. Anthropic did not give a timeline for these items.