Anthropic donates Agent Skills standard to AAIF
Anthropic said it is donating Agent Skills, the open standard for specialized agent knowledge and workflows, to the Agentic AI Foundation, a move that shifts stewardship of the system to a neutral body under the Linux Foundation. The company said the standard has already been integrated by more than 70 agent platforms and has seen 1 million skills published and nearly 280 million installed.
Evidence and context
In its Oct. 22, 2026 announcement, Anthropic said Agent Skills consists of a folder containing a SKILL.md file, plus scripts or reference material that help an AI agent complete a specific task or domain. The company said it developed the approach while building Claude Code, after finding that general knowledge performance was often not enough for procedural business tasks.
Anthropic said developers published thousands of skills on GitHub within weeks of its October 2025 launch, and that loaders were written for Codex, Cursor and OpenCode. The company then published Agent Skills as an open standard under its own GitHub organization and domain so that any agent could use it. Anthropic said the standard has since been adopted by platforms including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code.
The donation transfers the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain to the AAIF, according to Anthropic. The company said engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies will continue maintaining the standard as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag named as lead maintainers.
Anthropic said the AAIF will provide a neutral home for the standard and help guide future development. The company said the initial roadmap proposal covers versioned releases, a formal proposal process and security guidance for people who write and install skills. Anthropic also said community input and transparent decision-making will remain priorities, and that developers can continue to use or contribute to the standard without joining the foundation.
The announcement follows a series of recent Anthropic updates, including an Oct. 14, 2026 note on opening a Singapore office and signing an MOU with the Government of Singapore, and an Oct. 18, 2026 post on public benefit. Anthropic was founded in 2021 and has positioned its research around reliable, interpretable and steerable AI systems.