Anthropic hands Agent Skills to the Linux Foundation's agent group, which also takes on new projects from OpenAI, Hugging Face and Alibaba.

On Thursday, Oct 22, Anthropic said it is donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), the Linux Foundation group that already looks after MCP, the common way AI apps plug into outside tools (Anthropic). A skill is simply a folder with a SKILL.md instruction file, plus any scripts and reference material an agent needs for a task. Anthropic opened the format as a standard in December 2025. It says more than 70 platforms now support it, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code, and that "1 million skills have been published and nearly 280 million installed." Anthropic is handing over the name, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io site, and you don't have to join the foundation to use the standard. The plan for the project includes versioned releases, a formal process for proposing changes, and security guidance.

The foundation announced three more new projects at the same time (Linux Foundation). Open Responses, from OpenAI, is an open spec based on OpenAI's Responses API, meant to let one app talk to models from different providers the same way. OpenEnv, from Hugging Face, is for building environments where AI models are trained by trial and error, known as reinforcement learning. OpenSandbox, from Alibaba, is a sandbox for running agents in a walled-off space.

The foundation now has 10 projects, up from 3 when it launched in December 2025. The news came at the AGNTCon + MCPCon conference in San Jose, which runs Oct 22 and 23.

What to watch: the rules for changing the format now sit with a neutral group instead of a single company, which matters if you write skills for more than one tool. Watch for the first versioned release and the security guidance, since skills can include scripts.