To the same group as MCP
Anthropic on Oct. 22 (Oct. 23 Japan time) donated "Agent Skills," a system for teaching AI agents how to carry out work, to the industry group Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF). AAIF is under the Linux Foundation, which supports Linux and other open-source software. Anthropic launched AAIF with OpenAI and Block in December 2025 and had earlier donated "MCP," a standard for connecting external data and tools to AI.
Agent Skills is a system for loading "skills," which bundle instructions and scripts, into agents. Anthropic started it in its own Claude about a year ago and released it as a standard anyone can use in December 2025. According to the company, about 1 million skills have been published and they have been installed about 280 million times, and more than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code, have adopted it. The figures are the company's own, and there is no third-party count.
Name and domain also handed over
The donation covers the Agent Skills name and logo, its GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain. Anthropic employees will continue as the core maintainers of the standard, but engineers from Google and OpenAI will also join in a personal capacity. Anthropic proposed setting up versioned releases, a proposal process and guidelines for creating and installing skills safely. The company said it aims to keep the standard open and not tilted toward any particular company.
OpenAI donates an API specification
On the same day, OpenAI also donated the API specification "Open Responses" to AAIF. Based on OpenAI's API, the specification lets different companies' models be called with commands in the same format, and the company had been developing it since January. Amazon's AWS Bedrock, Databricks, Vercel, NVIDIA and others have announced support. Anthropic, on the other hand, uses its own API format and has not said whether it will support Open Responses.
Hugging Face's "OpenEnv" and China's Alibaba's "OpenSandbox" also joined AAIF, bringing the number of projects it hosts to 10, up from three at its launch. It has 305 member organizations, with 60 added this quarter alone.
