- Agent skills have become increasingly popular, so Anthropic now offers them openly.
- Microsoft is already using them in VS Code and GitHub, others soon
- Does Anthropic want to dominate an entire infrastructure layer?
Anthropic, the maker of Claude, has promised to release Agent Skills as an open standard in the future. VentureBeat has confirmed, with the hope that such openness will become the standard across the industry.
Since launching as a developer feature in October 2025, Agent Skills has become a core Anthropic product. 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 players that have relied on Anthropic for their skills, and the company claims to be “in active conversations with others across the ecosystem.”
Anthropic wants to make the world of AI more open and collaborative
Anthropic skills are reusable packages of instructions, scripts, and resources that enable AI to perform specialized tasks consistently. They eliminate the need for users to create specific prompts each time and are popular with coding, legal, financial, accounting, and data science applications.
“The response has been positive because the skills allowed them to customize Claude to the way they actually work and get high-quality results faster,” explained Mahesh Murag, chief product officer at Anthropic, in an interview with VentureBeat.
Murag also highlighted the complementary nature of Skills and MCP: “MCP provides secure connectivity to external software and data, while skills provide the procedural knowledge to use those tools effectively.”
This is not Anthropic’s first attempt to standardize 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 position it not just as a model and tools provider, but as an infrastructure layer that permeates the entire industry, including rivals like OpenAI and Google.
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