Anthropic Donates Agent Skills Standard to AAIF
The move places Agent Skills alongside MCP under the Linux Foundation-affiliated Agentic AI Foundation, shifting agent tooling and task-execution standards toward multi-stakeholder governance.
Anthropic announced on October 22, 2026, that it is donating the Agent Skills standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), which operates under the Linux Foundation. AAIF was co-founded last year by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, and Anthropic had previously donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the foundation.
Anthropic said the move is intended to keep Agent Skills open, community-driven, and not tied to a single vendor. The company first positioned Skills as an "open standard" last December, when some observers already expected it would eventually be placed under AAIF stewardship—an expectation now fulfilled.
For the agentic payments and machine-to-machine payments ecosystem, having Skills and MCP under the same neutral stewardship framework means the interface specifications for agents to call tools and execute tasks will increasingly be advanced through multi-party collaboration at the foundation level, rather than being led by a single model vendor.
Source: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/22/donating-agent-skills/
Provenance & status
- Byline
- OceanAlt Editorial
- First published
- 2026-10-24
- Last updated
- 2026-10-24
- Content type
- Newsflash
- Source material
- View original ↗
Related reading
Harbor Enters AI Agent Insurance With $10M Seed Round, Leaving Liability Attribution and Claims Pricing as the First Unsolved Problems
South Korea's President Confirms AI Role in Attacks on Seven Financial Firms: A Look at the Attack Chain
NVIDIA Open-Sources Agent Security Platform: Another Piece in the Agent Security Infrastructure, from Testing to Deployment
Paste a payee address before you pay and see whether it's on a sanctions list, through a mixer, or tagged for fraud.
This judgement can sit inside your own product
One line of code; it touches neither your CSS nor your JS. The same pre-settlement judgement can appear in your articles, on your wallet's confirmation screen, or as an endpoint your agent calls before it pays.