---
id: "2026-10-22-anthropic-donates-agent-skills-aaif"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-22-anthropic-donates-agent-skills-aaif/"
as_of: "2026-10-23T13:24:00+02:00"
date: "2026-10-22"
date_precision: day
category: open-source
importance: 3
confidence: high
status: [Confirmed]
sources: 2
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: null
---

As of: 2026-10-23 13:24 CEST.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-22-anthropic-donates-agent-skills-aaif/

# Agent Skills donated to the Agentic AI Foundation

Full title: Anthropic donates the Agent Skills open standard to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation: 70+ platforms, ~1M skills published, ~280M installs

On Oct 22, 2026 Anthropic donated Agent Skills, its open standard for packaging agent know-how as folders with a SKILL.md file, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, which already hosts MCP. The donation covers the specification, name and logo, GitHub organization and agentskills.io. Anthropic says 70+ agent platforms support the format, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code, with about one million skills published and nearly 280 million installed.

## Key facts
- Donated: the Agent Skills standard plus its name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain, to AAIF (Linux Foundation), co-founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI
- Format: a skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file and optional scripts or reference files; Anthropic published the standard in December 2025 after developing skills for Claude Code
- Adoption (Anthropic): 70+ agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code; ~1 million skills published; nearly 280 million installs
- Governance: maintained by engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and others acting as individuals; Lead Maintainers David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag; organizations can use or contribute without joining AAIF
- Roadmap: versioned releases, a formal proposal process, and security guidance for skill authors and installers

## What happened

Anthropic handed its second agent standard to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation, ten months after MCP. Skills started as a
Claude Code feature and became a de facto cross-vendor format; the donation puts its specification under neutral governance.

## Why it matters

With MCP (tools) and Agent Skills (procedural know-how) both at AAIF, the two most widely adopted agent-extension formats now sit outside
any single lab. The install numbers also show the scale of a new software-supply-chain surface, which is why the roadmap promises
security guidance for people installing skills.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): 175 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): 114 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Argon (training cutoff March 2026): 205 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): 144 days after its cutoff

## Sources

1. [Anthropic: Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation (Oct 22, 2026)](https://www.anthropic.com/news/donating-agent-skills-to-the-agentic-ai-foundation) (anthropic.com, official)
2. [Simon Willison: Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation](https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/22/donating-agent-skills/) (simonwillison.net, discussion)

## Changes

- 2026-10-23 (filed): Created (Simon Willison, Techmeme)

## Related

- 2025-12-09: [MCP donated to the Linux Foundation's new Agentic AI Foundation](https://postcutoff.com/e/2025-12-09-mcp-agentic-ai-foundation/index.md)
- 2024-11-25: [Anthropic open-sources the Model Context Protocol (MCP)](https://postcutoff.com/e/2024-11-25-model-context-protocol/index.md)
- People: [Simon Willison](https://postcutoff.com/person/simon-willison/)