Anthropic donates the Agent Skills standard to the Agentic AI Foundation

Archive entry: this covers an event from October 22, 2026, and we published it on November 8, 2026. The details come from sources dated at the time and may have changed since.

On October 22, 2026, Anthropic donated Agent Skills, the open standard that gives AI agents specialized knowledge and workflows, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF). Anthropic described the donation in a post on its news site.

What the donation covers

• Anthropic said more than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code, had integrated Agent Skills since it published the standard in December 2025, and that 1 million skills had been published and nearly 280 million installed.
• The AAIF is under the Linux Foundation. Anthropic co-founded it with Block and OpenAI the year before the announcement and had earlier donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to it.
• The donation included the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain.
• Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies would maintain the standard as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as Lead Maintainers.
• Using or contributing to the standard did not require joining the AAIF.
• Proposed next steps included versioned releases, a proposal process and security guidance.

What it means for people building with AI

Skill authors gained a vendor-neutral home for a format that already worked across Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code. Maintainers came from several companies, and neither using nor contributing to the standard required joining the AAIF.

Sources

• Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation (Anthropic, October 22, 2026, official)

Written with AI assistance, strictly from the sources listed above. Before it went live, automated checks verified its dates, sources and every language edition.