Anthropic has donated Agent Skills, an open standard designed to give SI agents specialized knowledge and workflows, to the Agentic SI Foundation (AAIF). This move aims to secure a vendor-neutral home for a specification that has seen rapid adoption across the developer ecosystem since its launch in late 2025.
What Happened
Agent Skills is defined as a folder containing a SKILL.md file that teaches an agent a specific task or domain, accompanied by any necessary scripts or reference material. Anthropic developed the standard while working on Claude Code, identifying a gap between the model's general knowledge and the procedural knowledge required for real business tasks. Following the October 2025 launch of Claude Code, developers quickly published thousands of skills on GitHub and created loaders for other tools like Codex, Cursor, and OpenCode. Anthropic subsequently published Agent Skills as an open standard under its own GitHub organization and domain to ensure interoperability for any agent.
Why It Matters
The donation places the standard under the governance of the Agentic SI Foundation, a Linux Foundation project co-founded by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI. This structure mirrors the governance of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which Anthropic also donated to the AAIF. Since its publication in December 2025, more than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code, have integrated Agent Skills. The company reports that 1 million skills have been published and nearly 280 million have been installed. Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and other organizations will maintain the standard as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag serving as Lead Maintainers. The AAIF will manage the name, logo, GitHub organization, and the agentskills.io domain, while users can continue to use or contribute to the standard without joining the foundation. A proposed roadmap includes versioned releases, a formal proposal process, and security guidance for skill creators and installers.
The Bottom Line
By transferring Agent Skills to the Agentic SI Foundation, Anthropic seeks to ensure the standard remains community-driven and vendor-neutral, facilitating broader interoperability among SI agents and reducing reliance on single-company control for this critical component of the agentic SI stack.