Today · announcement October 22

Anthropic donates Agent Skills; usage figures are its own

Anthropic donates Agent Skills, its format for agent skills, to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, and says more than 70 agent platforms have integrated it. Agent Skills is a file format for teaching AI agents specific tasks: each skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file plus any scripts or reference material it needs. The Agentic AI Foundation is a foundation Anthropic co-founded with Block and OpenAI in 2025. MCP (Model Context Protocol), which Anthropic donated earlier, is also housed there. Anthropic's post: "More than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code, have integrated Agent Skills since we published the standard in December 2025" (Anthropic, 2026-10-22). Anthropic also writes that 1 million skills have been published and installed nearly 280 million times; the post doesn't say how these are counted. The maintainers are engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies, acting in a personal capacity. The integration and install figures are Anthropic's own, with no second-party check. Our read: with the foundation governing the format, agents from different vendors read the same kind of skill file. The post gives no data on how well each vendor's agents use skills. How we checked →

Concept illustration: on the left, an upright cream board is lettered ANTHROPIC beside a black angular shape, with twelve laptops below in four rows of three, each screen showing a red folder icon. On the right, a wall sign lettered AGENTIC AI FOUNDATION hangs above a shelf holding a grey folder lettered MCP and a red folder lettered AGENT SKILLS, both with paper sheets showing at the top, and a hand reaching in from the right edge holds the red folder.

Source and checks

This item ran in the brief of Oct 23, 2026, alongside 6 other items. How we checked it, the quote checks and what was still missing that day are on that issue's How we checked page.

Cite this item

SecondSource (2026). "Anthropic donates Agent Skills; usage figures are its own." https://secondsource.io/en/product/2026-10-23-1/. Accessed access date.