Anthropic Donates the Agent Skills Standard to the Linux Foundation's AAIF

Huo Xing Cai Jing reports that Anthropic has donated the Agent Skills standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), under the Linux Foundation. The format was developed by Anthropic during the creation of Claude Code, launched in October 2025, and opened as a cross-platform standard in December. Over 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot, have already integrated it. Anthropic describes Skills as reusable playbooks for AI agents: developers can document task steps in SKILL.md files, along with scripts and reference materials, allowing different agents to access them on demand. MCP connects external tools and data, while Skills define how agents accomplish specific tasks. This donation includes the standard’s name, logo, GitHub organization, and official website domain. AAIF was launched in 2025 by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Block, and previously accepted MCP. Going forward, engineers from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google will jointly maintain the Skills standard in their personal capacities, no longer under Anthropic’s sole leadership. According to Vercel, the skills.sh directory now contains approximately one million skills with nearly 280 million cumulative installations. Snyk previously identified 76 malicious skills in ClawHub’s skill samples; Anthropic has proposed establishing version control, a formal proposal process, and security guidelines.