Agent Skills standard donated to the Agentic AI Foundation

On October 22, 2026, Anthropic announced it is donating the Agent Skills standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), which operates under the Linux Foundation. A skill is a package of instructions that tells an agent how to do a specific job; the standard will now sit under the foundation rather than a single company.

What was handed over?

According to Anthropic's announcement, the foundation receives the standard itself, the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain. Anthropic co-founded the AAIF last year with Block and OpenAI; the Model Context Protocol (MCP) was donated to the same foundation earlier.

What do the numbers say?

The announcement says the standard has been integrated by more than 70 agent platforms since it was published in December 2025, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code. In that time one million skills were shared and installed roughly 280 million times. These figures are Anthropic's own claims, not an independent measurement.

What happens next?

You do not need to join the foundation to use the standard or contribute to it. Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies will maintain it as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as lead maintainers. Versioned releases, a formal proposal process and security guidance for people who write and install skills are among the planned additions.

The practical upshot: a skill you write no longer stays inside one tool and can run in different agents that support the standard. For businesses that want to build agent-based workflows, our approach is described on the custom projects and automation page.