Anthropic is donating Agent Skills, the open standard for giving AI agents specialized know-how, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, according to an October 22 post on anthropic.com. For developers, the practical change is who governs the standard. How you write and use skills is not described as changing.

What moves to the foundation

Anthropic says it is donating the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain. The AAIF is the foundation Anthropic co-founded with Block and OpenAI last year, and Anthropic already donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to it. The post presents the AAIF as a neutral home where the community has a say in where the standard goes next.

You do not need to join the AAIF to use the standard or contribute to it, Anthropic says.

What stays the same

A skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file that teaches an agent a task, plus any scripts or reference material it needs. Anthropic says it built skills while working on Claude Code, launched them in October 2025 and published them as an open standard in December 2025. Our piece on Claude Duet covers another recent Anthropic agent product.

Anthropic reports that more than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code, have integrated the standard. It also reports 1 million skills published and nearly 280 million installed. Those are Anthropic's figures, and the post does not say how they are counted.

Who maintains it

Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies will maintain the standard as individuals, per Anthropic. David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag are the Lead Maintainers.

The proposed roadmap

Anthropic says it has proposed starting with three items:

  • Versioned releases.
  • A formal proposal process.
  • Security guidance for people who write and install skills.

Anthropic says the project will keep prioritizing community input, and that you can give feedback on proposed specification changes in the project's Discord. The security item matters because skills can carry scripts, though the post does not describe specific risks. Our story on 1Password for Agents covers another approach to keeping agent access in check.

What the post does not say

  • Any change to the Agent Skills specification itself.
  • Dates for the versioned releases, the proposal process or the security guidance.
  • How the figures for skills published and installed are measured.

Why it matters

Moving a standard that Anthropic says 70-plus platforms already use to a neutral body is the same step Anthropic took with MCP. Nothing in the post asks you to change how you write or install skills today, so the news is about governance, and the roadmap's contents and timing are still open.