Agent Skills joins the Agentic AI Foundation: after MCP, the skills standard gets a neutral home
What is it?
Agent Skills is a standard for teaching an agent a specific task with one folder: a SKILL.md file plus any scripts and reference material it needs. Anthropic published it in December 2025 and has now handed it to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, where MCP already lives. The name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain all move over. Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies will maintain it as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as lead maintainers.
Why does it matter?
Anthropic says more than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code, support the standard, and that 1 million skills have been published with nearly 280 million installsVendor claim. With a neutral foundation in charge instead of one vendor, a team's internal procedures written as skills are more likely to keep working across agents. A roadmap for versioned releases, a formal proposal process and security guidance for writing and installing skills is coming, so teams that ship skills will need to track spec changes.
Maturity
GAThe standard is already in use in many products. What changed is who runs it; versioning is only now being set up.
How to track it
- First release: watch the agentskills GitHub organization for the first versioned spec release.
- Security: check agentskills.io for the security guidance on writing and installing skills.
- Who joins: see which companies get added to the AAIF project list and the maintainer roster.