Anthropic hands Agent Skills to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation

Agent Skills, the open format for teaching AI agents specific tasks, now belongs to a neutral foundation. More than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor and GitHub Copilot, already use it.

Published October 25, 2026 10:23am EDT | Updated October 25, 2026 10:57am EDT · 1 min read

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Anthropic announcement image for Agent Skills (Anthropic)· 1 min read

Key points

Announced October 22, 2026
Agent Skills joins MCP at the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), hosted by the Linux Foundation
More than 70 agent platforms use it, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code
Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and others will maintain it

Anthropic has donated Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a group hosted by the Linux Foundation. Anthropic created the standard and published it in December 2025; now it will be run by a neutral body.

If you've never heard of Agent Skills, we explain them in plain English in MCP and Agent Skills, explained.

What Anthropic is handing over

Anthropic says it's donating:

the Agent Skills standard itself,
the name and logo,
the GitHub organization,
and the agentskills.io domain.

You can keep using the standard, or contribute to it, without joining the foundation.

Already widely used

According to Anthropic, more than 70 agent platforms have added Agent Skills since it launched, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code. That's why a neutral home matters: companies that compete with Anthropic are more willing to build on a standard that no single company controls.

Who will run it

Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies will maintain the standard as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as lead maintainers. Anthropic has proposed three first steps:

Versioned releases, so tools know exactly which version they support.
A formal proposal process for changes.
Security guidance for people who write and install skills.

The bigger picture

The Agentic AI Foundation was set up in December 2025 by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI. Anthropic donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to it then. The Linux Foundation says the foundation has grown from 3 projects to 10 in its first year; Agent Skills arrives alongside new projects called Open Responses, OpenEnv and OpenSandbox.

What it means for you

If you build with AI agents, skills you write should keep working across more tools.
If you just use AI apps, expect assistants to get better at specialized jobs, because the same skill can work in many apps.

Sources

Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation (Anthropic)
Agentic AI Foundation announces four new projects (Linux Foundation)

Source: Anthropic

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