Anthropic donates the Agent Skills standard to the Agentic AI Foundation

Anthropic handed the SKILL.md-based Agent Skills standard to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation, which also hosts MCP.

Anthropic has donated Agent Skills, the SKILL.md folder format for packaging agent instructions, scripts and reference material, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF). AAIF is the Linux Foundation body that already hosts MCP, according to Anthropic's October 22, 2026 announcement. If you write skills, the practical change is governance: the format you target in Claude Code, Cursor or Copilot is no longer controlled by a single vendor.

Anthropic says the donation covers the name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain. You can use or contribute to the standard without joining AAIF. Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies will maintain it as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as Lead Maintainers.

Anthropic also says more than 70 platforms have integrated the standard, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code, with 1 million skills published and nearly 280 million installed. Those figures come from Anthropic and have not been independently counted. The Linux Foundation's release lists Agent Skills as one of four new projects, alongside Open Responses, OpenEnv and OpenSandbox. That brings AAIF to 10 projects, including AGENTS.md and MCP.

Nothing in existing skills has to change. Developers Digest notes the spec still requires only name and description in the frontmatter. It points to the reference validator (skills-ref validate ./my-skill), though it says it didn't run the command itself.

Portability still isn't automatic. Cubic documents that agents differ in discovery paths, invocation and permissions. For example, Claude Code reads .claude/skills/, while Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini CLI and OpenCode read .agents/skills/. Test each skill in every agent you use.

The roadmap is still only proposed: versioned releases, a formal proposal process and security guidance for people who write and install skills. Until that guidance exists, Developers Digest suggests auditing any skill you didn't write for downloads piped into a shell and instructions to disable permission prompts.

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