Anthropic donates Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation

What happened

On 22 October 2026, Anthropic announced that it is donating the Agent Skills standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), which sits under the Linux Foundation. The news was passed on in a Simon Willison link post, which quotes Anthropic directly.

According to that quoted announcement, Anthropic is "committed to keeping Agent Skills open, community-driven, and vendor-neutral". It also says Anthropic co-founded the foundation with Block and OpenAI last year, and that it has already donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the same body.

Willison adds some context of his own. He notes that Anthropic first declared skills to be an "open standard" last December, and that he said then he would not be surprised to see the standard end up in the AAIF, which he described at the time as the recent new home of the MCP specification.

What it means if you build agents

The practical change is about ownership. A standard held by one company can change at that company's discretion. Anthropic says it wants Agent Skills to stay open, community-driven and vendor-neutral, and that is the reason for moving it to a foundation.

That matters if you are building an agent for work you will rely on, such as quoting, invoicing or chasing invoices. You are choosing pieces that you expect to keep using, and you would rather not rebuild them because one supplier changed direction. Neutral governance does not guarantee stability, and the announcement does not promise any specific technical change. It may, however, lower the risk of tying your work to a single vendor's plans.

Skills now sit alongside MCP under the same foundation, according to the announcement. That may be a signal about where the shared ground in agent building is likely to be.

Where Tool & Loop fits

Standards news is useful background, but it does not save you any time by itself. What takes work off your list is an agent that does a specific job from start to finish.

That is what Tool & Loop teaches: agents that take a job off your list, such as quoting a customer, chasing an invoice, cutting a video or checking their own work.

If you are watching the foundation news and wondering what to build, pick the job that costs you the most time each week and start there.