On October 22, 2026, Anthropic donated Agent Skills, the open standard for giving AI agents specialized knowledge and workflows, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation. The donation covers the specification plus the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain. AAIF was co-founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI, and Anthropic had earlier donated the Model Context Protocol to it.
A skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file and any supporting scripts or reference material. Anthropic says it developed the format while building Claude Code, launched skills in October 2025 and published the open standard in December 2025. According to the announcement, more than 70 agent platforms have integrated Agent Skills, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code, with 1 million skills published and nearly 280 million installs.
Under the foundation, engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies will maintain the standard as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as lead maintainers. Using or contributing to the standard does not require AAIF membership. A proposed roadmap covers versioned releases, a formal proposal process, and security guidance for skill authors and installers.
Why it matters: with both MCP (how agents reach tools and data) and Agent Skills (how agents are taught procedures) now under one vendor-neutral foundation, the two most widely adopted agent interfaces of the period are governed outside any single lab, which lowers the risk for platforms that build on them.
What it does not show: the adoption figures are Anthropic’s own and the post does not say how installs are counted. The security guidance for installing third-party skills is still only on the roadmap, not published.