Anthropic donates Agent Skills open standard to Agentic AI Foundation, says 70+ platforms use it after 2025 MCP donation to AAIF
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| Source: Techmeme | Original article
Anthropic has donated its Agent Skills open standard to the Agentic AI Foundation, saying more than 70 platforms have integrated it, after its 2025 MCP donation.
Anthropic announced on October 22 that it is transferring ownership of the Agent Skills open standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a neutral body hosted by the Linux Foundation. The donation includes the standard’s name, logo, the agentskills.io domain and the associated GitHub organization.
Agent Skills, first published in December 2025, defines a “skill” as a folder containing a SKILL.md file that encodes specialized knowledge and workflow instructions for AI agents. Since its release, more than 70 agent platforms – among them ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio Code – have integrated the standard, and the community has already contributed roughly one million individual skills.
The move builds on Anthropic’s earlier 2025 contribution of the Model Control Protocol (MCP) to the same foundation, signalling a broader strategy to place core interoperability assets in a vendor‑neutral ecosystem. By handing the standard to AAIF, Anthropic hopes to accelerate cross‑platform compatibility, reduce fragmentation, and lower the barrier for developers to create and share reusable agent capabilities.
Stakeholders will watch how the AAIF governs future extensions, licensing and certification of new skills, and whether other AI vendors adopt the framework to avoid lock‑in. The foundation’s stewardship could also influence regulatory discussions on AI transparency, as a common skill format makes agent behavior easier to audit.
Next steps include AAIF’s rollout of a public roadmap, potential collaborations with cloud providers to embed Agent Skills in their services, and the emergence of third‑party marketplaces where developers can publish and monetize skill packages. The industry will gauge whether this open‑standard model can become the de‑facto lingua franca for agentic AI.
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