Write down how your team works once, and it now goes wherever your AI goes.
Agent skills moving to an open standard means a team can write its way of working down once and carry it across tools. The playbook is the asset.
Anthropic has handed Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation, under the Linux Foundation. Same neutral home as MCP, the standard that plugs agents into software.
A skill is a folder with a short instruction file that teaches an AI agent how a job gets done, your way.
More than 70 platforms already read them, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code. 1 million skills published. Nearly 280 million installs. All since late 2025.
For organisations, your know-how stops being locked inside one tool. Change vendors and the playbooks come with you.
For teams, the process that lives in one person's head can be written down once and handed to any agent.
For developers and engineers, build a skill once and use it across those platforms. You can use the standard or contribute to it without joining the foundation.
OpenAI, Hugging Face and Alibaba donated projects to the same foundation that day. Love to see rivals sharing the plumbing.
Want to start? Pick one task your team repeats every week and write it up as a skill.
Security guidance for people who write and install skills is on the roadmap. Until then, read a skill before you install it.
The tools will keep changing. Your playbooks don't have to.