Anthropic Donates Agent Skills Open Standard to Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation

On October 22, Anthropic announced it is donating the Agent Skills open standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a Linux Foundation organization, transitioning the standard from a single-company project to a community-governed AI agent capability standard.

AAIF was established on December 9, 2025, and is operated by the Linux Foundation. It was co-founded by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI to host and govern open protocols, standards, and open-source projects in the AI agent ecosystem. Anthropic previously donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the organization. Agent Skills can be understood as instruction manuals for AI agents: folders containing SKILL.md files that teach agents specific tasks or domain knowledge, optionally accompanied by scripts, templates, and reference materials. Agents can load these skills on demand to reuse workflows and expertise across different products.

Since its release as an open standard in December 2025, more than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code, have integrated Agent Skills. Anthropic said the number of public skills has reached about 1 million, with cumulative installations of approximately 280 million. The donation covers not only the specification itself but also the Agent Skills name, logo, GitHub organization, and the agentskills.io domain. Anthropic emphasized that the standard will remain open, community-led, and vendor-neutral, and that developers and enterprises can continue to use or contribute to it even without joining AAIF.