Anthropic Donates Agent Skills Standard to the Agentic AI Foundation
Anthropic has officially donated the Agent Skills standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation. This follows a similar move made last year when Anthropic transferred the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the same neutral foundation. This donation ensures that Agent Skills remains an open, community-driven, and vendor-neutral specification rather than being controlled by a single company. Such open governance encourages broader cross-industry adoption and interoperability among different AI agent platforms. Agent Skills provides a lightweight, open format for extending AI agent capabilities through a directory structure containing a core SKILL.md file alongside instructions and resources. The specification was originally released by Anthropic in December 2025 before being transitioned to the AAIF.
## BACKGROUND
The Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) is a neutral, open-source initiative hosted under the Linux Foundation to support agentic AI innovations through collaborative development. Similarly, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard created to safely connect AI applications with external tools and data sources.