Anthropic hands its Agent Skills standard to the Agentic AI Foundation
The format, already adopted by more than 70 agent platforms, will now be maintained jointly by engineers from several AI companies rather than one vendor.
Anthropic is handing its Agent Skills standard, a format for packaging task-specific instructions and scripts that AI agents can load, over to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation. The standard, first published in December 2025, has been adopted by more than 70 agent platforms, among them ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code. Anthropic says 1 million skills have been published and close to 280 million installed. The donation covers the Agent Skills name, logo, GitHub organization and agentskills.io domain, and the standard can be used or contributed to without joining the foundation. Maintenance will be shared by engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies, led by David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag. The proposed roadmap includes versioned releases, a formal proposal process and security guidance for skill authors and installers.
Why it matters
For people who follow where AI agents are heading, the change is about governance: a format used across dozens of platforms is moving from a single company's control to a shared, open process. The standard can be used or contributed to without joining the foundation, so access stays open. The proposed roadmap, with versioned releases, a formal proposal process and security guidance for skill authors and installers, suggests the format is being treated as shared infrastructure, with its safety practices made explicit.
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