Agent Skills now belongs to the Agentic AI Foundation

On October 22, 2026, Anthropic donated Agent Skills, the open SKILL.md format behind Claude Skills, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF). For you, nothing changes today: your Skills keep working, and the format now has an owner that is not a single company. We checked this against Anthropic's announcement on 2026-10-23.

This site is independent and not affiliated with Anthropic. We read the announcement, we did not run anything new, and the practical advice below comes from that text and from our existing guides.

What Anthropic announced

The announcement is short. Anthropic says it is donating the standard to the AAIF, "which we co-founded with Block and OpenAI last year". The same post lists exactly what moves:

"We are donating the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization, and the agentskills.io domain."

So the name, the code repository home and the website are no longer Anthropic's to steer alone. Maintenance changes too. Anthropic writes that "Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and other companies will maintain the standard as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as Lead Maintainers."

What a skill is, in one sentence

If you have never opened one, Anthropic's definition is the plainest we have found:

"A skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file that teaches an agent a specific task or domain, along with any scripts or reference material it needs."

That is the whole idea. A weekly report format, a brand voice, a checklist for reviewing a contract: you write it once as plain text in a folder, and an agent loads it when the task matches. Anthropic's Skills documentation adds that Claude matches your request against the description to decide whether to trigger one.

The numbers Anthropic gave

Anthropic reports adoption in the same 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."
• "So far, 1 million skills have been published and nearly 280 million installed."

These are Anthropic's own figures, in its own announcement. We have not found a second source that counts them, so read them as the publisher's claim, not an audit.

What changes for you this week

Almost nothing, and that is the honest answer. Anthropic states it directly: "You can continue to use the standard or contribute to it without joining the AAIF." The post announces no new Claude feature, no new setting and no price.

Here is what the move can change over time, based on what the announcement says is planned:

• A neutral home makes it easier for other tools to treat the format as a shared standard instead of a Claude detail.
• Anthropic proposes "a roadmap covering versioned releases, a formal proposal process, and security guidance for people who write and install skills."
• Versioned releases could, in principle, let you tell which edition of the format a skill was written for. That is our reading, not a promise in the post.

Notice the wording: the roadmap is proposed. No dates are published, so do not plan around any of it.

A five-minute check you can do now

You do not need the news to act on it. If you already use Skills, open one of your own folders and confirm three things:

1. The folder contains a file named exactly SKILL.md.
2. The file starts with a name and a description, the text Claude reads to decide when the Skill applies.
3. Any scripts or reference files it mentions sit inside the same folder.

A folder that passes has the basic shape the standard asks for, though our own guides note that the open specification and Claude's upload screens differ on limits such as description length, so check the destination before you copy a Skill over. If you are starting from zero, create a Claude Code Skill walks through writing and testing one, and syncing claude.ai Skills with Claude Code covers moving them between surfaces.

Where this stops helping you

A shared format is not a shared behavior. Anthropic's Skills documentation says "Custom Skills do not sync across surfaces", and that network access differs: on the API Skills "cannot make external API calls or access the internet", while in Claude Code they "have the same network access as any other program on the user's computer."

Another tool that reads SKILL.md may follow your instructions differently, or ignore a script entirely. The announcement does not promise identical results across the 70-plus platforms.

So before you move a Skill you rely on into another tool, do three things:

1. Look in that tool's own documentation for SKILL.md support, and for any limits it sets on names or descriptions.
2. Run the Skill once on a low-stakes task and compare the result with what Claude gave you.
3. Read any bundled script line by line, because a script runs with whatever access the new tool grants it.

Security is the other limit. Anthropic itself lists "security guidance for people who write and install skills" in its proposed roadmap, so do not assume that guidance exists yet. Until it does, follow Anthropic's current advice: "Use Skills only from trusted sources: those you created yourself or obtained from Anthropic." Our Skills guide covers the same warning in plain terms.

Does Anthropic still control Agent Skills?

No, not alone. Anthropic donated the name, logo, GitHub organization and agentskills.io domain to the AAIF. Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies will maintain the standard as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as Lead Maintainers.

Do I need to join the AAIF to keep using Skills?

No. Anthropic says: "You can continue to use the standard or contribute to it without joining the AAIF." Your existing Skills and the way you write new ones stay the same. The announcement adds no new requirement for people who only use Skills.

Will my Claude Skills work in other tools now?

Maybe, but the announcement does not guarantee it. It says more than 70 agent platforms have integrated Agent Skills since December 2025. Whether your particular Skill behaves the same elsewhere depends on that tool, so test it there before relying on it.

If you want the next piece of Skills news in your inbox, the newsletter is the place. Otherwise, how to use Claude is the better starting point for a first session.