Anthropic donates agent skills standard to foster community-driven AI agent development

Anthropic has donated the Agent Skills open standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a nonprofit under the Linux Foundation, marking a shift from a proprietary initiative to a community-led effort. The donation includes the standard’s name, branding, GitHub organization, and the agentskills.io domain. AAIF was established on December 9, 2025, by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, and is tasked with governing open protocols and projects in the AI agent ecosystem. Anthropic previously contributed the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the organization. Agent Skills, described as a 'manual' for AI agents, enables them to load specific task or domain knowledge through SKILL.md files, along with scripts and templates. Since its open standard release in December 2025, over 70 platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot, have integrated Agent Skills. Anthropic reports that approximately 1 million skills are now publicly available, with over 280 million installations. The donation emphasizes openness, community governance, and vendor neutrality. Anthropic notes that developers and companies can continue using or contributing to the standard without joining AAIF.