Products & tools· 1 min read
The Agent Skills standard moves to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation
Anthropic donated Agent Skills, the open format for instructions that AI agents load only when needed, to the neutral foundation that already hosts MCP.
On October 22, 2026, Anthropic announced that it is donating the Agent Skills standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a project hosted by the Linux Foundation. The foundation already looks after the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
What are Agent Skills?
A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file of instructions, plus any scripts or reference files an agent needs for a specific job, like filling in a form or following a company's writing style. The agent loads a skill only when a task calls for it, which keeps its context window lean.
Anthropic says more than 70 agent platforms have adopted the format and about one million skills have been published.
Why it matters
When agent standards are run by a neutral foundation, tools from different companies can work together. Engineers from several companies, including Google and OpenAI, will help maintain it. See where skills fit in an agent in The harness.
Read the original at Anthropic
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