Industry #Anthropic#AI agents Oct 23, 2026 · Originally published Oct 22

Anthropic donates the Agent Skills standard to the Linux Foundation's AAIF: more than 70 agent platforms, about 1 million skills published and nearly 280 million installs

After MCP, Anthropic hands a second agent standard to a neutral foundation. What it gave away, who maintains it now, and the security piece on the roadmap.

Primary source Anthropic News · anthropic.com Read the original ↗

// Key points

  • A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file that teaches an agent a task, plus any scripts or reference material it needs. Since it was published as an open standard in December 2025, more than 70 platforms have integrated it, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code.
  • The recipient is the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), which Anthropic co-founded with Block and OpenAI and which already holds MCP. Anthropic is handing over the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain; using or contributing to the standard doesn't require joining the AAIF.
  • Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies maintain the standard as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as Lead Maintainers.
  • The proposed first roadmap covers versioned releases, a formal proposal process, and security guidance for people who write and install skills.

Builder's takeI'd write the team's internal prompts and runbooks to the SKILL.md spec rather than any one vendor's format: with the standard in a neutral foundation, the same skills should move between Claude Code, Codex and Copilot as they are. PandaClaws' content pipeline is already a step-by-step procedure, which is exactly what a skill is for. Treat installing someone else's skill like adding a dependency; until the security guidance lands, only install skills whose scripts you've read.

// Background · from #Anthropic

Full timeline →
  1. Oct 23 Claude Models on Google Cloud (Anthropic managed) launches: the Claude API run by Anthropic, reached through a Google Cloud project, with IAM for access and Marketplace for billing
  2. Oct 23 Claude Code 2.1.309 fixes several sandbox and permission gaps, including sandboxed Bash running shell startup files outside the sandbox before each command
  3. Oct 22 Claude API ships 2026-10-21, its first new version since 2023-06-01: temperature, top_p and top_k now return errors, and new major SDKs move to Apache 2.0