Agent Skills moves to the Linux Foundation. Instructions you write for one AI tool now have a neutral home

On 22 October Anthropic donated Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), which the Linux Foundation hosts. The handover covers the standard, its name and logo, the GitHub organisation and the agentskills.io domain. AAIF announced it in San Jose together with three other new projects: Open Responses from OpenAI, OpenEnv from Hugging Face and OpenSandbox from Alibaba. The foundation already looks after the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and AGENTS.md.

What a skill is

A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file inside. The file gives the skill a name, a short description and instructions for one task. The folder can also hold scripts, reference documents and templates. An agent reads only the names and descriptions at the start and opens the full instructions when a task matches, so it can keep many skills available without filling its context.

In practice this is where a company's own way of working goes: how to format a quote, which checks a contract needs before it leaves the building, how the monthly sales report is put together.

Why the move matters

Anthropic says more than 70 agent platforms have adopted the format since it became an open standard in December 2025, among them ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code. By its count, one million skills have been published and nearly 280 million installed. Until now one vendor owned the specification. Under AAIF, engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies will maintain it as individuals, and anyone can use it or contribute without joining the foundation.

The proposed roadmap lists versioned releases, a formal process for proposing changes, and security guidance for people who write and install skills. That last item deserves attention. A skill can carry scripts that an agent runs, so installing one from an unknown author is closer to installing software than to reading a document.

What to do on Monday

• ✳Pick two or three tasks your team explains to the AI tool over and over, and write each one down as a skill: what the task is, the steps, an example of a good result
• ✳Store the skill folders in one shared place with version history, so the instructions survive when the person who wrote them leaves
• ✳Before rolling out a skill, test it in the tools your staff actually use. Support is broad but each product loads skills in its own way
• ✳Treat skills from outside the company like any other software: read the SKILL.md and every script before installing, and keep a list of what is installed where
• ✳If you are choosing between AI vendors, ask whether they support Agent Skills. Procedures written in an open format move with you if you switch

The work of describing how your company does things stays the same whichever tool wins. Writing it in an open format means you only have to do it once.