Anthropic has handed control of Agent Skills, its format for teaching AI agents how to do specific jobs, to the Agentic AI Foundation, a body under the Linux Foundation. Anthropic announced it on 22 October 2026.
A skill is a folder holding a SKILL.md file of instructions, plus any scripts or reference material the agent needs. Anthropic built the idea while working on Claude Code, which handled general tasks well but lacked the step-by-step know-how that business work demands. Per Anthropic’s post, more than 70 platforms now support the format, among them ChatGPT, Cursor, Copilot from GitHub, and VS Code. Developers have published 1 million skills, with nearly 280 million installs.
Anthropic is also giving up the name, the logo, the agentskills.io domain, and its GitHub organization. Maintenance falls to individual engineers, including some from Google and OpenAI, led by Mahesh Murag and David Soria Parra. The first roadmap covers versioned releases, a formal process for proposing changes, and security advice aimed at anyone who writes or installs skills.
A skill you write today no longer depends on one vendor’s roadmap, which makes the format a safer bet to build on across tools.
Reported by Anthropic on 22 October 2026.
