Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation
Simon Willison’s Weblog Simon Willison ● Covered by 2 sources
Anthropic is handing its Agent Skills standard to the Agentic AI Foundation. That keeps it open, vendor-neutral, and under the same group that now hosts MCP.
Based on reporting by Simon Willison’s Weblog, Simon Willison — read the original for the full story.
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Anthropic says it is donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation, or AAIF, under the Linux Foundation. The company says it wants the standard to stay open, community-driven, and vendor-neutral.
AAIF is the same group Anthropic helped create with Block and OpenAI last year. It is also where Anthropic previously donated the Model Context Protocol, better known as MCP. So this is less a one-off gesture than a pattern: Anthropic keeps pushing its tooling into a standards body instead of trying to lock it up.
Simon Willison says he saw this coming back in December, when Anthropic first described skills as an open standard. That earlier call now looks pretty solid.
There’s also a neat bit of recursion here. Willison says he found his own old post by asking Claude to search his site through the datasette-mcp plugin. The model found the page that talked about donating skills to a standards body, which is a very on-brand way for an AI standards story to turn into an AI-powered scavenger hunt.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the right move, and not just because open standards sound noble in press releases. If Anthropic wants Agent Skills to matter beyond one vendor’s product, the standards body is where it belongs. Closed “ecosystems” age like milk; standards at least get a fighting chance.
Read more about this at: Simon Willison’s Weblog