Agent Skills

What it is

An Agent Skill is a folder that packages instructions, scripts and other resources for one kind of task. Claude does not read every skill all the time. It scans the available skills, loads only the ones that match the task in front of it, and can combine several when a job needs more than one. Because a skill can include executable code, it can do more than give advice: it can run a script that produces a file or checks a result.

Origins

Anthropic introduced Agent Skills on 16 October 2025. The same format works in the Claude apps, in Claude Code and in the API, where a /v1/skills endpoint manages versions of a skill.^[1] At launch Anthropic supplied skills for Excel, PowerPoint, Word and fillable PDFs, and Canva, Notion, Rakuten and Box were quoted in the announcement.^[1]

On 18 December 2025 Anthropic published Agent Skills as an open standard, meant to make skills portable across platforms. The standard is hosted at agentskills.io.^[1][2]

Governance and adoption

On 22 October 2026 Anthropic donated the standard, along with its name, logo, GitHub organisation and the agentskills.io domain, to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation.^[2] The Agentic AI Foundation is a directed fund that holds open projects so that no single company controls them. Anthropic had already donated the Model Context Protocol to the same foundation.

At the time of the donation, more than 70 agent platforms had integrated the standard, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code. A million skills had been published, and nearly 280 million had been installed.^[2]

The standard is maintained by engineers from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, who work on it as individuals rather than as company representatives. David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag are the lead maintainers.^[2]

How it works in practice

A skill is useful because it turns a repeated way of working into something a model can pick up on demand. A team that makes presentations, for example, can keep the house style, the layouts it prefers and the steps for checking a file in one skill, and Claude loads that skill when a presentation is requested. The model stays general, while the skill supplies the specific procedure.

Because the same folder can run in several products, a skill written once can be used in the apps, in a coding agent or through the API. That portability is the reason for the open standard: without it, each platform would need its own version of the same instructions.^[1][2]

Relation to other standards

Agent Skills and the Model Context Protocol are complementary. A skill tells Claude how to do a task. MCP connects Claude to the systems the task needs, such as a document store or a messaging service.^[1][2] The two standards together describe how an assistant learns what to do and how it reaches the tools and data it needs.