Anthropic is handing the standard for Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), which operates under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation. According to Simon Willison's weblog, the company wants to keep Skills open, community-driven and vendor-neutral.
What exactly happened
Anthropic, Block and OpenAI jointly founded the AAIF last year. Anthropic has already placed the Model Context Protocol (MCP) there, a specification that lets AI applications access external tools and data. Now the standard for Skills is being added.
Willison points out that he had already expected this step last December. That was when Anthropic first explicitly described Skills as an open standard. Even then, he thought it conceivable that the specification would end up at the AAIF, which is now also the home of MCP.
Why this can be interesting for developers
Skills can be understood, in simplified terms, as reusable packages of instructions and supplementary material that an AI agent can draw on for specific tasks. If the format sits with a neutral foundation, it no longer has to be developed further by a single vendor alone. That can improve planning certainty for teams that write their own Skills or build tools around them.
Whether neutrality actually materializes in everyday practice, however, depends on how the foundation works. Anyone using Skills should watch how changes to the standard are decided in the future and who is allowed to contribute.
A small side note
Willison also describes how he found his old post: his blog is accessible to Claude through the datasette-mcp plugin. He asked Claude to check, via the MCP access to his site, whether he had ever written about handing Skills over to a standards body. That is how the model found the text. It is a small example of how open interfaces can work together in everyday use.
For practical purposes, the following applies for now: the announcement mainly concerns the governance of the standard. Whether and how the format itself will change is not stated in the material and should be checked in the official statements from those involved.
