Anthropic gives Agent Skills to the Linux Foundation, so the AI instructions you write can work like a recipe card in any kitchen
By Brett Gavaghan, Founder of Adaptd ·
On 22 October Anthropic handed its Agent Skills format to the Agentic AI Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation. No single company will control it.
The short version
- Agent Skills is an open format for packaging instructions, scripts and files that an AI agent loads when it needs them.
- Anthropic donated it to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation on 22 October, alongside new projects from OpenAI, Hugging Face and Alibaba.
- Skills your team writes now are more likely to keep working if you change AI tools later.
Every business that uses AI seriously ends up writing the same thing: a set of instructions explaining how we do things here. The question has always been whether that work is stuck inside one tool.
What is Agent Skills?
Agent Skills is an open format for giving AI agents new abilities, created by Anthropic about a year ago. A skill bundles instructions, scripts and supporting files into a package that an agent loads only when a task needs it, such as your proposal template or your invoice checking steps.
On 22 October Anthropic donated the format to the Agentic AI Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation. Anthropic gave the foundation the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the standard that connects AI to other apps, less than a year ago.
What else did the Agentic AI Foundation add?
The Agentic AI Foundation added four projects on 22 October: Agent Skills from Anthropic, Open Responses from OpenAI, OpenEnv from Hugging Face and OpenSandbox from Alibaba. That takes it to 10 projects, up from three when it launched in December 2025.
The foundation says its job is open, vendor-neutral governance, meaning no single company controls how these standards change. When rival AI companies agree on something, it's worth noticing, even if it's mostly plumbing.
Should your business care about Agent Skills?
Your business should care about Agent Skills if you're writing reusable instructions for AI, because a shared standard makes that work more portable between tools. Skills are packaged so they can move across agent products and platforms, rather than living in one app's settings.
My advice: write down your best processes as plain, step-by-step instructions now, whatever tool you use. That document is the hard part, and it becomes a skill easily later. A clear process beats a clever prompt every time.
A good recipe card doesn't care whose oven it ends up in.
Wondering what this means for your business?
That's exactly what the discovery call is for.