On October 22, Anthropic released a announcement that donated its Agent Skills open standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation. This move allowed the standard to officially move out of a single company’s control and become a standard for AI agents governed by the community.
AAIF is not a new entity. It was established on December 9, 2025, and is operated by the Linux Foundation. It was originally created jointly by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, and is specifically responsible for hosting and managing open protocols, standards, and open-source projects within the AI ecosystem. In fact, Anthropic already has a precedent—they previously donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the past.
The so-called Agent Skills can be imagined as a “manual” written for an AI agent: a folder containing the SKILL.md documentation file, responsible for teaching the agent specific tasks or domain knowledge, along with scripts, templates, and reference materials. The agent loads these as needed, allowing it to reuse the same workflow and expertise across different products.
The ecological ambition behind millions of skills
Since this standard was released in an open format in December 2025, its spread has not slowed down. More than 70 intelligent platform services such as ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code have integrated it. Anthropic revealed that the number of publicly available Skills has approached 1 million, with a total installation of approximately 280 million times.
This donation not only included the specifications themselves, but also packaged the name, logo, GitHub organization, and the domain name of agentskills.io for Agent Skills. Anthropic emphasized that this standard will remain open, community-led, and neutral toward suppliers—even without joining AAIF, developers and enterprises can use it and contribute to it. By handing over the “manual” to the community, perhaps the goal is to establish the foundation of AI agent capabilities in a widely recognized industry language.