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    Agent Skills now belong to the Agentic AI Foundation: what changes for skill authors

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    Abstract cover: a dark folder holding one file marked with an orange line, set inside a larger outlined frame

    Short answer

    On October 22, 2026, Anthropic donated Agent Skills, the SKILL.md format, to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation. The name, logo, GitHub organization and agentskills.io domain moved. None of the sources announces a change you must make to existing SKILL.md files.

    Every claim below links to its source: Anthropic's post, the AAIF's own pages, the spec at agentskills.io, and the governance files in the spec repo. All were checked on 2026-11-11. Where the sources say nothing, this page says so.

    What moved

    What moved to the Agentic AI Foundation, with sources
    ItemWhat the sources saySource, quoted
    The standardDonated to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) on October 22, 2026Anthropic's post"Today, we're donating Agent Skills, the open standard that gives AI agents specialized knowledge and workflows, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF)."
    Name and logoDonatedAnthropic's post"We are donating the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization, and the agentskills.io domain."
    GitHub organizationDonated. The spec repo is github.com/agentskills/agentskillsAnthropic's post"the GitHub organization"
    agentskills.io domainDonated. The spec still lives thereAnthropic's post"Read the specification at agentskills.io"
    TrademarkAnthropic's post says "name and logo" and does not use the word trademark. The project's governance file points to LF Projects for trademark rulesGOVERNANCE.md"Policies applicable to Agent Skills and participants in Agent Skills, including guidelines on the usage of trademarks, are located at https://www.lfprojects.org/policies/."
    Legal homeA series of LF Projects, LLC (stated in the future tense)GOVERNANCE.md"Agent Skills will be established as Agent Skills a Series of LF Projects, LLC."
    LicensesApache 2.0 for code and specification, CC BY 4.0 for other documentationGOVERNANCE.md"All outbound code and specifications will be made available under the Project License.""All documentation (excluding specifications) will be made available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license"
    Do you have to join the AAIF?NoAnthropic's post"You can continue to use the standard or contribute to it without joining the AAIF."
    Sources: Anthropic, "Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation" (2026-10-22), and GOVERNANCE.md in agentskills/agentskills (adopted 2026-11-04). Checked 2026-11-11.

    The AAIF announced the same day that it had taken on four projects: "Agent Skills, contributed by Anthropic; Open Responses, contributed by OpenAI; OpenEnv, contributed by Hugging Face; and OpenSandbox, contributed by Alibaba" (AAIF press release). Agent Skills now has a project page on the foundation's site (aaif.io/projects/agent-skills).

    The AAIF itself, in Anthropic's words from December 2025, "is a directed fund under the Linux Foundation co-founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI, with support from Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare and Bloomberg" (Anthropic, MCP donation post). Anthropic donated the Model Context Protocol to it at that time.

    Who runs it now

    People, not companies. Anthropic's post says: "Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and other companies will maintain the standard as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as Lead Maintainers."

    The repo's GOVERNANCE.md, adopted November 4, 2026, sets four roles. It says: "Membership in technical governance is for individuals, not companies. No seats are reserved for specific companies, and membership stays with the person when that person changes employers."

    Agent Skills governance roles and current holders
    RoleScope (GOVERNANCE.md)Current holders (MAINTAINERS.md)
    Lead MaintainersFinal decision authorityMahesh Murag, David Soria Parra
    Core MaintainersThe specification and overall project directionAiden Cline, Nick Cooper, Colin Daymond Hanna, Harald Kirschner, Kurtis Van Gent
    MaintainersDocumentation, the reference library, and other componentsNone at this time
    ContributorsIssues, pull requests, and discussionsAnyone
    Sources: GOVERNANCE.md section 2 and MAINTAINERS.md (last updated 2026-11-04), checked 2026-11-11. MAINTAINERS.md lists the TSC Representative as "Not yet designated."

    The Lead Maintainers and Core Maintainers together form the Technical Steering Committee (TSC). The Lead Maintainers name one TSC member as its representative to "the Governing Board of the Agentic AI Foundation" (GOVERNANCE.md, section 6).

    How decisions get made

    GOVERNANCE.md, section 4: "Decisions are made at the lowest appropriate level." Maintainers decide inside their area. Above that: "The TSC decides by consensus wherever possible. Where consensus cannot be reached, the Core Maintainers decide by a majority vote of all Core Maintainers, subject to a veto by any Lead Maintainer."

    Spec changes come in two kinds (section 5). "Bug fixes, typo corrections, clarifications and new examples are made by ordinary pull requests." Anything that "adds, removes or alters normative behavior" is a substantive change and needs Core Maintainer approval. Once the project has a numbered Specification Proposal track, a substantive change will go through five steps: proposal, sponsor, review, decision, final. A proposal "becomes final when the specification text is merged and at least one working implementation demonstrates the change."

    The same section adds: "Releases of the specification will be tagged and will carry a changelog, so that implementers can declare and test against a specific version." Anthropic's post lists the proposed first roadmap: "versioned releases, a formal proposal process, and security guidance for people who write and install skills."

    Decisions are recorded in public. "Except for matters handled in those channels, decisions and the discussion that supports them must be recorded on GitHub" (section 7). Questions go to GitHub Discussions, bugs to GitHub Issues, and there is a public Discord server.

    Where the spec lives now

    The URLs did not change. The repo added an LF Projects legal notice to the site footer on November 4, 2026 (commit d6dd4b7). It reads "Copyright © Agent Skills a Series of LF Projects, LLC".

    Does anything change for existing SKILL.md files?

    The sources do not say. Neither Anthropic's post, the AAIF press release, the AAIF blog post, the spec nor GOVERNANCE.md mentions any change that existing SKILL.md files must make. Here is what they do say:

    • Anthropic's post: "You can continue to use the standard or contribute to it without joining the AAIF."
    • GOVERNANCE.md, section 5: a future Specification Proposal must state "the effect on existing skills and clients". So a later spec change has to spell out its effect on your files before it is accepted.
    • GOVERNANCE.md, section 2: maintainers are expected to favor "a small specification and a high bar for additions."

    The repo history matches. The two donation commits on November 4, 2026 touched four files: GOVERNANCE.md and MAINTAINERS.md (commit 83021e2), and the site's footer.js and style.css (commit d6dd4b7). The last change to the spec file is dated August 4, 2026, before the donation (spec file history, checked 2026-11-11). The spec page shows no version number today.

    What to do: nothing is required. If you want to know before a spec change lands, watch the repo for Specification Proposals, or join the Discord, where Anthropic says you can "give feedback on proposed specification changes" (Anthropic's post).

    A minimal skill that follows the spec today

    The spec's directory structure section: "A skill is a directory containing, at minimum, a SKILL.md file." The SKILL.md format section: "The SKILL.md file must contain YAML frontmatter followed by Markdown content." Two frontmatter fields are required.

    One folder:

    changelog-entry/
└── SKILL.md

    One file, changelog-entry/SKILL.md:

    ---
name: changelog-entry
description: Writes a CHANGELOG.md entry from the staged git diff. Use when the user asks for a changelog entry, release notes for a commit, or to update CHANGELOG.md.
---

# Changelog entry

1. Run `git diff --staged` and read the changes.
2. Group them under Added, Changed or Fixed.
3. Write one line per change in plain words.
4. Add the entry at the top of CHANGELOG.md.
5. Show the entry to the user before you save the file.

    Why each line is there:

    • name: changelog-entry matches the folder name, as the name field section requires ("Must match the parent directory name"). It uses only lowercase letters and single hyphens.
    • description says what the skill does and when to use it, per the description field section. At startup, agents load "only the name and description of each available skill" (agentskills.io overview), so the description decides when your skill runs.
    • The body has no required format. The body content section: "There are no format restrictions." The progressive disclosure section recommends keeping the main SKILL.md "under 500 lines".

    Check it with the reference validator, as the validation section shows:

    skills-ref validate ./changelog-entry

    Every frontmatter field in the spec

    SKILL.md frontmatter fields, with links to the spec
    FieldRequiredRule (from the spec)
    nameYesMust be 1-64 characters. Lowercase a-z, 0-9 and hyphens. No leading, trailing or double hyphens. Must match the parent directory name.
    descriptionYesMust be 1-1024 characters. Should say what the skill does and when to use it.
    licenseNoLicense name or reference to a bundled license file.
    compatibilityNo1-500 characters if provided. Only for specific environment requirements.
    metadataNoA map from string keys to string values.
    allowed-toolsNoSpace-separated string of pre-approved tools. Experimental.
    Source: agentskills.io specification, frontmatter. Each field name links to its section. Checked 2026-11-11.

    Optional folders (scripts/, references/, assets/) are covered in the spec's optional directories section. The example above does not need any of them.

    Adoption, as Anthropic states it

    These are Anthropic's figures from Anthropic's post, not independent counts: "More than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code, have integrated Agent Skills since we published the standard in December 2025." And: "So far, 1 million skills have been published and nearly 280 million installed." The AAIF's blog post repeats the 70 platforms, 1 million skills and 280 million installation figures.

    Find and share skills on AY CLAUDE

    AY CLAUDE is a skills catalog. Browse skills from the catalog home, or publish your own. Related: Claude Code with Claude Fable 5.2: setup and cost and Best Claude Code subagents in 2026.

    Sources

    All checked 2026-11-11.

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