- Agent Skills have become increasingly popular, so now Anthropic is open-sourcing them
- Microsoft is already using them in VS Code and GitHub, others soon
- Does Anthropic want to dominate an entire infrastructure layer?
Claude maker Anthropic has promised to release its Agent Skills as an open standard going forward, VentureBeat has confirmed, in the hope such openness will become the standard across the industry.
Since launching as a developer feature in October 2025, Agent Skills have become a core product for Anthropic. The open specification and reference SDK are published at agentskills.io, and Microsoft has already adopted Anthropic’s Skills in VS Code and GitHub.
Cursor, Goose, Amp and OpenCode are among other coding agents to have leant on Anthropic for its Skills, with the company claiming to be “in active conversations with others across the ecosystem.”
Anthropic wants the world of AI to be more open and collaborative
Anthropic’s Skills are reusable bundles of instructions, scripts and resources that allow AI to perform specialized tasks consistently. They eliminate the need for users to craft specific prompts every time, and are popular among coding, legal, finance, accounting and data science applications.
“The feedback has been positive because skills let them personalize Claude to how they actually work and get to high-quality output faster,” Anthropic Product Manager Mahesh Murag explained in an interview with VentureBeat.
Murag also noted the complementary nature of Skills and MCP: “MCP provides secure connectivity to external software and data, while skills provide the procedural knowledge for using those tools effectively.”
This isn’t Anthropic’s first stab at standardizing artificial intelligence. It previously published the Model Context Protocol (MCP) – an open standard for connecting AI assistants with third-party tools, services and data.
More broadly, Anthropic’s industry-leading moves could see it positioning itself as not just a model and tool provider, but an infrastructure layer that permeates the entire industry, including rivals like OpenAI and Google.
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