Anthropic Hands Agent Skills Standard to Open Foundation

Anthropic has handed over governance of Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a Linux Foundation project. Agent Skills is an open standard published in December 2025. It gives AI agents extra instructions and knowledge for specific tasks. AAIF was founded a year ago by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI together. The foundation had already taken in MCP (Model Context Protocol) the same way. MCP is a standard for connecting agents to external tools. Today's transfer moves the Agent Skills name, logo, GitHub organization, and the agentskills.io domain to AAIF. More than 70 agent platforms now support Agent Skills, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code. Around 1 million skills have been published. They have been installed close to 280 million times.

Handing the standard to a neutral foundation means no single company decides where it goes next. A skill written today is more likely to still work across different agent tools a year from now. That is because one vendor no longer sets the rules for the format. The million published skills say nothing about quality on their own. But the standard's neutrality matters more for long-term use than the install count does.