TipSkills become a shared standard: Anthropic hands Agent Skills to the Linux Foundation
Anthropic has donated Agent Skills, the standard for teaching AI agents a specific task, to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation. More than 70 AI platforms already support it, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code. If you write your own skills, it means less lock-in to a single AI company.
On 22 October 2026 Anthropic announced that it is donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a foundation under the Linux Foundation. A skill is a folder with a text file called SKILL.md that teaches an AI agent a specific task or domain, plus any scripts and reference material. An agent is an AI that can carry out several steps for you on its own. Anthropic developed skills for its coding tool Claude Code and published them as an open standard in December 2025.
According to Anthropic, more than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code, have built in the standard. Anthropic says 1 million skills have been published and installed nearly 280 million times. Anthropic is handing over the name, the logo, the GitHub organisation and the agentskills.io domain. Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and others will maintain the standard, and you do not need to join the foundation to use it or contribute.
AAIF was founded last year by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI and is already home to MCP, the protocol many AI services use to connect other apps, and to AGENTS.md. On the same day, according to the Linux Foundation, the foundation took in three more projects: Open Responses from OpenAI, a shared way for apps to talk to AI models from different providers, OpenEnv from Hugging Face and OpenSandbox from Alibaba. The foundation now has 10 projects.
What does it mean for you? If you only use ChatGPT or Claude day to day, there is nothing to do. But if you write instructions you reuse, for example for quotes, tone of voice or reports, it is a sign that skills are the format going forward, and that a skill you write today is more likely to work in several tools. Anthropic proposes that the foundation starts with versioned releases, a formal proposal process and security guidance for people who write and install skills.
How to get started
- Read the short specification at agentskills.io to see how a skill is structured.
- Collect instructions you often paste into a skill instead of rewriting them every time. The Prompt Workshop has a prompt that helps you write one.
- Keep your skills in a folder you own, so you can move them between tools.
- Only install skills from sources you trust, and read SKILL.md and any scripts before using them, since a skill can contain code.
More on TipAI
Sources
- Anthropic: Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation (22 okt 2026) (retrieved 2026-10-23)
- The Linux Foundation: Agentic AI Foundation Announces Four New Projects (22 okt 2026) (retrieved 2026-10-23)
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