Agent Skills
An open standard from Anthropic that packages procedural knowledge as a folder with a SKILL.md file an agent discovers and loads on demand.
- term
- Agent Skills
- category
- knowledge-memory
- short_def
- An open standard from Anthropic that packages procedural knowledge as a folder with a SKILL.md file an agent discovers and loads on demand.
- long_def
- A Skill is a directory containing a SKILL.md (metadata plus instructions), optional scripts and resources, which an agent loads dynamically only when relevant — keeping the context window lean. Anthropic unveiled Agent Skills on 16 October 2025 and released it as an open standard at agentskills.io on 18 December 2025; Microsoft, OpenAI, GitHub, Figma and Cursor adopted it.
- see_also
context-engineeringmcptool-use- etymology_origin
- Unveiled by Anthropic on 16 October 2025 and released as an open standard at agentskills.io on 18 December 2025; each Skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file of metadata and instructions.
- related_to
context-engineeringmcptool-useprompt-cachingagentic-rag- contrast_with
- Unlike MCP, which connects an agent to external tools and data at runtime, Agent Skills package reusable procedural knowledge (how to do a task) that the agent loads into context on demand — know-how, not a tool connection.
- example
- Anthropic released Agent Skills as an open standard on 18 December 2025, with Microsoft, OpenAI, GitHub, Figma and Cursor adopting it.
- source
- https://claude.com/blog/skills
- status
- active
- why_it_matters
- Agent Skills let a service ship its own how-to knowledge to any compatible agent as a portable folder, so agents can perform domain tasks correctly without bespoke prompting.
- sameAs
- —
- bridge_entity
- agent-readiness
- last_verified
- 2026-06-15
- md_twin
- /glossary/agent-skills.md