Anthropic donates the Agent Skills specification to the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation

At AGNTCon + MCPCon in Seattle, Anthropic announced that it has donated the Agent Skills open specification (agentskills.io) to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a directed fund of the Linux Foundation that Anthropic co-founded in December 2025 when it contributed the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

How Agent Skills and AAIF fit together

First released by Anthropic in October 2025 and published as an open specification in December 2025, an Agent Skill is a directory containing a SKILL.md file with YAML frontmatter (name and description), markdown procedural instructions and optional helper scripts or reference templates. Agents load only the short frontmatter at startup and read the full instructions on demand. Since December 2025, more than 70 platforms including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, Goose, Snowflake and VS Code have adopted the format, with over 100k skills published on GitHub.

Anthropic will co-maintain the specification with community contributors as AAIF standardises enterprise skill discovery, versioning and distribution. In the same announcement, AAIF accepted three additional open-source projects: OpenAI’s Open Responses (openresponses.org), Hugging Face and Meta’s OpenEnv for reinforcement-learning environments, and Alibaba’s OpenSandbox, bringing AAIF to seven hosted projects and more than 195 member organisations.