Anthropic plans Agent Skills donation to Agentic AI Foundation

Anthropic has announced plans to donate Agent Skills to the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation, or AAIF, putting the open standard on a path toward vendor-neutral governance. The proposed contribution covers the Agent Skills name and logo, its GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain. Anthropic said people can continue using or contributing to the standard without joining AAIF.

Agent Skills packages specialized instructions and workflows for AI agents. Each skill is a directory built around a required SKILL.md file, with optional scripts, reference material, templates and other assets. The project repository licenses code under Apache 2.0 and documentation under CC BY 4.0.

The transfer would take decision-making beyond Anthropic. According to the AAIF project proposal, Anthropic currently leads the project, with decisions resting with its leadership team. The onboarding plan calls for a multi-organization Technical Steering Committee and published GOVERNANCE.md and MAINTAINERS.md files. Anthropic named David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as lead maintainers and said engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies would maintain the standard as individuals.

Under the proposed 12-month roadmap, the continuously updated specification would give way to tagged releases and a changelog. Implementers could then declare and test against a particular version. Normative changes would move from the current GitHub Discussions intake to a numbered proposal track with a documented approval rule.

Planned security work includes a SECURITY.md file, a vulnerability-disclosure process, dependency and code scanning, and guidance for skill authors and users. The proposal also calls for stabilizing or removing the experimental allowed-tools field before a versioned release. That field describes tools a skill is pre-approved to use, while skills can bundle executable scripts.

Anthropic said more than 70 agent platforms have integrated Agent Skills and claimed that one million skills had been published and nearly 280 million installed. The opened sources did not disclose a counting method or independently auditable dataset for those figures.

AAIF launched under the Linux Foundation in December 2025 with Model Context Protocol, goose and AGENTS.md as its initial project contributions. The foundation describes itself as a neutral home for open agentic AI projects.

At the research cutoff, the public proposal tracker showed AAIF Technical Committee approval but still labeled the contribution agreement unsigned and the Governing Board review unfinished. The opened records therefore did not establish that the domain, GitHub organization, trademarks and other assets had completed legal and operational transfer.