Anthropic has opened a directory submission portal that lets developers on paid Claude plans submit, track and monetize third-party extensions for Claude, the company said in a September 25 blog post. The portal covers plugins, which package Model Context Protocol (MCP) connectors, Agent Skills, or both, into a single listing that appears in the Claude directory once approved.
Before this, getting a connector or skill in front of Claude’s users meant submitting it and waiting, with little visibility into where it stood. The new portal changes that: submissions are auto validated and safety scanned on arrival, developers can see review status and specific feedback, and they choose when to flip the switch on publishing.
Two paths exist for submission. A single MCP connector can point straight to a remote MCP server. A plugin bundle combines MCP servers and skills, hosted on GitHub, submitted as a repo. Inside Claude Code specifically, that bundle format can also carry language server protocol integrations, custom commands, hooks and agents, a wider surface than the web version of Claude currently exposes.
Once a plugin goes live, developers get usage analytics: install counts broken out by product surface and version, and on the discovery side, data on how many times a listing was viewed and the specific search terms that surfaced it. That is the kind of discovery data developers on Apple’s App Store or the Chrome Web Store have had for years and that Claude’s ecosystem previously lacked. Anthropic is also framing this as a step toward MCP 2.0, the newer version of its tool-calling protocol built around a stateless core, alongside two extensions: MCP Apps, for rendering interactive UI inside a chat conversation, and Enterprise Managed Auth, aimed at giving corporate users zero-touch OAuth logins.
Anthropic says the current split between separate discovery surfaces for Claude and Claude Code will merge into a single one over the next several weeks. Skills and connectors already listed in the directory carry over automatically; nothing needs to be resubmitted. The company frames plugins as the primary vehicle going forward, with the option for existing connector listings to convert into plugins later.
The timing matters. OpenAI has spent much of 2026 building out its own GPT and agent store, and Claude’s plugin economy has so far leaned on developers self-hosting MCP servers with limited feedback loops back to Anthropic. A formal review pipeline with safety scanning and analytics is table stakes for any platform trying to attract a serious third-party developer base rather than a scattering of hobby connectors.
Developers already building MCP servers or Agent Skills for Claude should treat the submission portal as the new default path to visibility, since installs and search placement inside the Claude directory will now depend on going through it rather than word of mouth.
Reported by Anthropic’s Claude blog on 25 September 2026.
