Agent Skills are folders of instructions that teach an AI agent one job, such as filling in a company’s Word template, so a team gets it done its own way each time. Each folder holds a SKILL.md text file plus any scripts or templates. The agent reads only each skill’s name and short description at the start, like labels on file drawers, and opens the full instructions when a task matches. Anthropic launched the format in October 2025. On October 22, it gave the Agent Skills name, logo, GitHub organization and agentskills.io website to the Agentic AI Foundation, a Linux Foundation group that also hosts the Model Context Protocol, the standard that connects agents to tools. Anthropic says more than 70 products, including ChatGPT, Cursor and GitHub Copilot, now read skills.
The foundation’s job, says its technology chief Manik Surtani, is shared standards “with no single company controlling the outcome.” The skills charter, adopted November 4, ties its seven voting seats to people, not employers. On November 6, Anthropic changed the terms of its four Office skills, for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files. Before, the terms barred copying, changing or passing them on. Now anyone may copy, change and share the skills behind Claude’s own document features.
In a Vercel coding test, the agent never opened an available skill in 56% of cases. Snyk scanned 3,984 skills from two public registries in February: 13.4% had a critical security issue, and 76 contained malicious payloads.
Read More: NVIDIA SkillSpector, a free scanner that checks an agent skill for malware and vulnerabilities before you install it
Sources:
- Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation (Anthropic)
- Agentic AI Foundation Announces Four New Projects: Agent Skills, Open Responses, OpenEnv, and OpenSandbox (Linux Foundation)
- Agent Skills Governance, adopted November 4, 2026 (agentskills on GitHub)
- Change to the docx, pdf, pptx and xlsx skills, November 6 (anthropics/skills on GitHub)
- AGENTS.md outperforms skills in our agent evals (Vercel)
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Citation
@misc{kabui2026,
author = {{Kabui, Charles}},
title = {Agent {Skills:} {Folders} {That} {Teach} {AI} {Agents} a
{Task,} {Now} {Hosted} by the {Linux} {Foundation}},
date = {2026-11-12},
url = {https://toknow.ai/posts/agent-skills-linux-foundation-agentic-ai-foundation-office-skills/},
langid = {en-GB}
}