Based on each vendor’s official docs, checked October 23, 2026

Agent Skills moves to the Agentic AI Foundation: what changes

On Oct 22, 2026 Anthropic donated Agent Skills, the open SKILL.md format, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, the same home it gave the Model Context Protocol. This page covers what moved, who maintains the standard now, and what it means if you already write skills for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or GitHub Copilot. For the hands-on how-to of writing one portable SKILL.md, see our portable skills guide; this page is about the standard itself.

1. 1. Confirm your skills follow the spec, not one vendor

   A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file whose frontmatter has at least name and description, plus optional scripts/, references/ and assets/. That is the part the AAIF now stewards.

   my-skill/
   ├── SKILL.md
   ├── scripts/
   ├── references/
   └── assets/

2. 2. Keep vendor extras in vendor files

   Codex reads optional UI, invocation-policy and tool-dependency settings from agents/openai.yaml beside SKILL.md. Keeping such extras out of SKILL.md keeps the core file portable.

   interface:
     display_name: "Optional user-facing name"
   policy:
     allow_implicit_invocation: false

3. 3. Follow the spec and roadmap at the new home

   The specification stays at agentskills.io. Anthropic says the proposed roadmap starts with versioned releases, a formal proposal process and security guidance for people who write and install skills.

What Anthropic donated

Per Anthropic's announcement, the donation covers the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain. You can keep using or contributing to the standard without joining the AAIF.

The AAIF sits under the Linux Foundation; Anthropic co-founded it with Block and OpenAI and earlier donated MCP to it.

Who maintains it now

Per Anthropic, engineers from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI maintain the standard, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as Lead Maintainers. The agentskills.io site invites discussion on GitHub and Discord.

How big the standard is

Anthropic says more than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code, have integrated Agent Skills since the standard was published in December 2025, and that 1 million skills have been published and nearly 280 million installed. These are Anthropic's figures; we have not verified them independently.

What changes for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor users today

Nothing in the file format changed with the donation: a skill is still a folder with SKILL.md, loaded by progressive disclosure (name and description at startup, full instructions when a task matches).

OpenAI's Codex docs say its skills build on the open agent skills standard. Codex scans .agents/skills from the working directory up to the repo root, plus ~/.agents/skills, /etc/codex/skills and bundled system skills, and can disable a skill with a [[skills.config]] entry in ~/.codex/config.toml.

The practical change is governance: future versions, proposals and security guidance will come from a vendor-neutral project rather than one company. Watch for versioned releases before relying on new fields.

Tips

• Validate skills against the spec at agentskills.io rather than one product's docs.
• Keep one job per skill and front-load trigger words in description; Codex shortens descriptions first when many skills are installed.
• Treat third-party skills like code: read scripts/ before installing, since security guidance is still on the roadmap.

Next steps

Sources

• https://www.anthropic.com/news/donating-agent-skills-to-the-agentic-ai-foundation · checked 2026-10-23
• https://agentskills.io/ · checked 2026-10-23
• https://developers.openai.com/codex/skills · checked 2026-10-23