Anthropic is donating Agent Skills, the open standard for giving AI agents specialized knowledge and workflows, to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation1,3. The transfer, announced on October 22, 2026, follows Anthropic's earlier donation of the Model Context Protocol to the same body and marks the second major open standard the company has moved to vendor-neutral governance4.
Agent Skills has been integrated by more than 70 agent platforms, with 1 million skills published and nearly 280 million installed, according to Anthropic. The donation transfers the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization, and the agentskills.io domain to the Agentic AI Foundation.
Four donations, four companies
Agent Skills was one of four projects contributed to the Agentic AI Foundation on October 222. OpenAI contributed Open Responses, Hugging Face contributed OpenEnv, and Alibaba contributed OpenSandbox. The additions bring the foundation to 10 hosted projects, up from three at its December 2025 launch. Existing projects include the Agent2Agent protocol, Agent Router, agentgateway, AGENTS.md, goose, and the Model Context Protocol.
The four new projects address different layers of the agentic stack: how agents gain new skills, how applications talk to models across providers, how agents are trained and evaluated, and where agents run safely, according to the foundation.
"A year ago, AAIF launched with three projects and a bet that agentic AI needed a neutral home to thrive. Today we host 10," said Manik Surtani, CTO and co-founder of the Agentic AI Foundation. Surtani said four different companies chose to contribute the projects to neutral governance, giving the community one place to build shared standards with no single company controlling the outcome.
Agent Skills origins
Anthropic said it developed Agent Skills while building Claude Code, after finding that general knowledge performance was often not enough for procedural business tasks. An Agent Skill consists of a folder containing a SKILL.md file plus scripts or reference material that help an AI agent complete a specific task or domain. Developers published thousands of skills on GitHub within weeks of the standard's October 2025 launch, and loaders were written for Codex, Cursor, and OpenCode. Platforms that have since adopted the standard include ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code.
Anthropic co-founded the Agentic AI Foundation with Block and OpenAI. The announcements coincide with AGNTCon + MCPCon North America, taking place October 22–23, 2026, at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.
Simon Willison noted on October 22 that he had predicted the donation in December 2025, when Anthropic first declared Agent Skills to be an open standard.
ANALYSIS The simultaneous contributions from Anthropic, OpenAI, Hugging Face, and Alibaba extend the Agentic AI Foundation's reach across competing AI vendors, covering skill formats, model-provider interoperability, training environments, and sandboxing within a single governance structure.