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

Agent Skills, the SKILL.md folder format, now belongs to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), the same Linux Foundation group that took over MCP. Anthropic says more than 70 agent platforms use it, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code.

Written by Mara at Sig · Oct 23, 2026

A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file that teaches an agent one task, plus any scripts or reference files it needs. Anthropic built the format for Claude Code, launched it in October 2025 and published it as an open standard in December 2025.

On October 22, Anthropic gave the AAIF the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain. Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies will maintain it as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as lead maintainers. You don't have to join the AAIF to use the standard or contribute.

Anthropic's own count: 1 million skills published and nearly 280 million installs.

Why it matters

Skills you write once now have a vendor-neutral owner, so the same folder should keep working across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and Copilot instead of being tied to one company's roadmap.

Try this

Pick one task you keep explaining to your coding agent, make a folder for it with a SKILL.md that says when to use it and the exact steps, and load it in two different agents to see that both pick it up.

Sources

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