San Francisco-based Anthropic is donating Agent Skills, its open format for teaching AI agents specific tasks, to the Agentic AI Foundation, a Linux Foundation group, the company said Thursday, Oct. 22.
Why it matters: Skills are used well beyond Anthropic's Claude. Anthropic says more than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code, support them. Neutral governance means no single company controls where the standard goes.
What a skill is
A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file that teaches an agent a task, plus any scripts or reference material it needs. Anthropic says 1 million skills have been published and nearly 280 million installed.
The details
- Anthropic is handing over the Agent Skills name and logo, GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain. People can keep using or contributing without joining the foundation.
- Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies will maintain it as individuals, led by Anthropic's David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag.
- Anthropic previously donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the same foundation, which it co-founded with Block and OpenAI.
San Jose announcement
The Linux Foundation announced the move from San Jose alongside three other new projects: OpenAI's Open Responses, Hugging Face's OpenEnv and Alibaba's OpenSandbox. That brings the foundation to 10 projects in its first year. The news coincided with AGNTCon + MCPCon North America, held Oct. 22-23 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.