Anthropic releases Agent Skills as open standard, challenging OpenAI in enterprise AI race

Claude's Skills just got easier to manage and share - here's how

Anthropic Skills was released in October. With the feature, Claude can be taught to do repeatable tasks. Updates include new partners, a new open standard, and more. Anthropic has distinguished itself from competitors by staying laser-focused on its enterprise customers with offerings catered to make working professionals' lives easier. The Skills feature, launched in October, aimed to do just that, and now it has received an upgrade, making it easier for organizations to take advantage. With the Skills feature, users can provide Claude with a set of instructions, including resources like brand guidelines, so that the chatbot can reference them when performing specialized tasks autonomously. Since launching, the company has incorporated feedback and is now incorporating that into this new wave of updates, including enhanced collaboration. Also: I test AI for a living, and these 3 free tools are the ones I used most in 2025 Perhaps the biggest announcement is that Anthropic is launching its Agent Skills specification as an open standard. Similar to the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard launched by Anthropic for connecting AI assistants and agents to data systems seamlessly and securely, the Agent Skills open standard makes skills easier to share and deploy to everyone. In the same spirit of increased collaboration, Skills created can now be managed centrally, allowing Team and Enterprise administrators to distribute skills more easily and control whether they are available by default or opt-in for users. Ideally, this allows employees in an organization to access all the necessary skills in one place, enabling new collaboration opportunities, while also giving administrators more control. Also: You can try Google's new Gemini 3 Flash AI model today for free - it's even in Search's AI Mode Other simpler updates include easier access to Skills, with it now residing in the Tools sidebar, which Anthropic described as "quick-create flow-just describe what you want, and Claude builds it." Lastly, it includes a partner skills directory, which serves as a hub of pre-built skills built by companies such as Canva, Notion, Figma, Zapier, Atlassian, Cloudflare, Stripe, and more. Ultimately, this should help teams identify and develop skills. To help conceptualize the feature's value, Anthropic provided examples of how it is being used by companies. These include applying brand style guidelines, creating org email templates, and task creation that follows team conventions, such as creating tasks in Asana, Jira, and other tools. For individual workflows, some examples include creating personal skills for PDF manipulation, such as converting formats, and prototype deployment, such as creating Slack bots.

Anthropic wants to tame workplace AI

Why it matters: Chatbots can't achieve meaningful productivity gains and return on investment for businesses until they're tailored to how users actually work. * While the consumer race is currently dominated by ChatGPT and Gemini, Anthropic's models continue to outpace both OpenAI and Google's models in the enterprise. Driving the news: Anthropic updated the "skills" feature in its Claude chatbot Thursday to help companies use AI to reduce the busywork of repeatable tasks. * Skills are reusable instruction sets that teach Claude specific workflows, standards, and domain knowledge. Think: brand style guidelines, email templates and task creation in tools like Jira and Asana. * Anthropic says the latest updates make skills easier to use, build and discover. * Skills now includes integration with popular workplace tools, including Notion, Canva, Figma and Atlassian. Between the lines: Anthropic also announced that Agent Skills is now an open standard making skills portable across different tools and platforms, which means skills people create in Claude can be used in models like ChatGPT or platforms like Cursor, that adopt the standard. * Enterprise admins will be able to manage skills and employees will be able to access them in one central location. * Anthropic says workers can create new skills with prompts: "just describe what you want, and Claude builds it," the company says. The big picture: The rush to deploy AI across workplaces has largely been messy and fraught. * Some employees are pretending that they don't use AI at work, while others are pretending that they do. Yes, but: Slow workplace AI adoption may be just as much about scattered tools as it is about workers' fears of automating themselves out of a job. * Workplace skills honed over years in a career are what give increasingly anxious employees a sense of job security. * Anthropic's offer to automate those skills may not be welcome to some -- or, conversely, may be a boon to those already enjoying increased productivity. The bottom line: For this grand AI experiment to work, there must be some consistency. Anthropic hopes its upgraded enterprise tools will help.

Anthropic launches enterprise 'Agent Skills' and opens the standard, challenging OpenAI in workplace AI

Anthropic said on Wednesday it would release its Agent Skills technology as an open standard, a strategic bet that sharing its approach to making AI assistants more capable will cement the company's position in the fast-evolving enterprise software market. The San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company also unveiled organization-wide management tools for enterprise customers and a directory of partner-built skills from companies including Atlassian, Figma, Canva, Stripe, Notion, and Zapier. The moves mark a significant expansion of a technology Anthropic first introduced in October, transforming what began as a niche developer feature into infrastructure that now appears poised to become an industry standard. "We're launching Agent Skills as an independent open standard with a specification and reference SDK available at https://agentskills.io," Mahesh Murag, a product manager at Anthropic, said in an interview with VentureBeat. "Microsoft has already adopted Agent Skills within VS Code and GitHub; so have popular coding agents like Cursor, Goose, Amp, OpenCode, and more. We're in active conversations with others across the ecosystem." Skills are, at their core, folders containing instructions, scripts, and resources that tell AI systems how to perform specific tasks consistently. Rather than requiring users to craft elaborate prompts each time they want an AI assistant to complete a specialized task, skills package that procedural knowledge into reusable modules. The concept addresses a fundamental limitation of large language models: while they possess broad general knowledge, they often lack the specific procedural expertise needed for specialized professional work. A skill for creating PowerPoint presentations, for instance, might include preferred formatting conventions, slide structure guidelines, and quality standards -- information the AI loads only when working on presentations. Anthropic designed the system around what it calls "progressive disclosure." Each skill takes only a few dozen tokens when summarized in the AI's context window, with full details loading only when the task requires them. This architectural choice allows organizations to deploy extensive skill libraries without overwhelming the AI's working memory. The new enterprise management features allow administrators on Anthropic's Team and Enterprise plans to provision skills centrally, controlling which workflows are available across their organizations while letting individual employees customize their experience. "Enterprise customers are using skills in production across both coding workflows and business functions like legal, finance, accounting, and data science," Murag said. "The feedback has been positive because skills let them personalize Claude to how they actually work and get to high-quality output faster." The community response has exceeded expectations, according to Murag: "Our skills repository already crossed 20k stars on GitHub, with tens of thousands of community-created and shared skills." Anthropic is launching with skills from ten partners, a roster that reads like a who's who of modern enterprise software. The presence of Atlassian, which makes Jira and Confluence, alongside design tools Figma and Canva, payment infrastructure company Stripe, and automation platform Zapier suggests Anthropic is positioning Skills as connective tissue between Claude and the applications businesses already use. The business arrangements with these partners focus on ecosystem development rather than immediate revenue generation. "Partners who build skills for the directory do so to enhance how Claude works with their platforms. It's a mutually beneficial ecosystem relationship similar to MCP connector partnerships," Murag explained. "There are no revenue-sharing arrangements at this time." For vetting new partners, Anthropic is taking a measured approach. "We began with established partners and are developing more formal criteria as we expand," Murag said. "We want to create a valuable supply of skills for enterprises while helping partner products shine." Notably, Anthropic is not charging extra for the capability. "Skills work across all Claude surfaces: Claude.ai, Claude Code, the Claude Agent SDK, and the API. They're included in Max, Pro, Team, and Enterprise plans at no additional cost. API usage follows standard API pricing," Murag said. The decision to release Skills as an open standard is a calculated strategic choice. By making skills portable across AI platforms, Anthropic is betting that ecosystem growth will benefit the company more than proprietary lock-in would. The strategy appears to be working. OpenAI has quietly adopted structurally identical architecture in both ChatGPT and its Codex CLI tool. Developer Elias Judin discovered the implementation earlier this month, finding directories containing skill files that mirror Anthropic's specification -- the same file naming conventions, the same metadata format, the same directory organization. This convergence suggests the industry has found a common answer to a vexing question: how do you make AI assistants consistently good at specialized work without expensive model fine-tuning? The timing aligns with broader standardization efforts in the AI industry. Anthropic donated its Model Context Protocol to the Linux Foundation on December 9, and both Anthropic and OpenAI co-founded the Agentic AI Foundation alongside Block. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services joined as members. The foundation will steward multiple open specifications, and Skills fit naturally into this standardization push. "We've also seen how complementary skills and MCP servers are," Murag noted. "MCP provides secure connectivity to external software and data, while skills provide the procedural knowledge for using those tools effectively. Partners who've invested in strong MCP integrations were a natural starting point." The Skills approach is a philosophical shift in how the AI industry thinks about making AI assistants more capable. The traditional approach involved building specialized agents for different use cases -- a customer service agent, a coding agent, a research agent. Skills suggest a different model: one general-purpose agent equipped with a library of specialized capabilities. "We used to think agents in different domains will look very different," Barry Zhang, an Anthropic researcher, said at an industry conference last month, according to a Business Insider report. "The agent underneath is actually more universal than we thought." This insight has significant implications for enterprise software development. Rather than building and maintaining multiple specialized AI systems, organizations can invest in creating and curating skills that encode their institutional knowledge and best practices. Anthropic's own internal research supports this approach. A study the company published in early December found that its engineers used Claude in 60% of their work, achieving a 50% self-reported productivity boost -- a two to threefold increase from the prior year. Notably, 27% of Claude-assisted work consisted of tasks that would not have been done otherwise, including building internal tools, creating documentation, and addressing what employees called "papercuts" -- small quality-of-life improvements that had been perpetually deprioritized. The Skills framework is not without potential complications. As AI systems become more capable through skills, questions arise about maintaining human expertise. Anthropic's internal research found that while skills enabled engineers to work across more domains -- backend developers building user interfaces, researchers creating data visualizations -- some employees worried about skill atrophy. "When producing output is so easy and fast, it gets harder and harder to actually take the time to learn something," one Anthropic engineer said in the company's internal survey. There are also security considerations. Skills provide Claude with new capabilities through instructions and code, which means malicious skills could theoretically introduce vulnerabilities. Anthropic recommends installing skills only from trusted sources and thoroughly auditing those from less-trusted origins. The open standard approach introduces governance questions as well. While Anthropic has published the specification and launched a reference SDK, the long-term stewardship of the standard remains undefined. Whether it will fall under the Agentic AI Foundation or require its own governance structure is an open question. The trajectory of Skills reveals something important about Anthropic's ambitions. Two months ago, the company introduced a feature that looked like a developer tool. Today, that feature has become a specification that Microsoft builds into VS Code, that OpenAI replicates in ChatGPT, and that enterprise software giants race to support. The pattern echoes strategies that have reshaped the technology industry before. Companies from Red Hat to Google have discovered that open standards can be more valuable than proprietary technology -- that the company defining how an industry works often captures more value than the company trying to own it outright. For enterprise technology leaders evaluating AI investments, the message is straightforward: skills are becoming infrastructure. The expertise organizations encode into skills today will determine how effectively their AI assistants perform tomorrow, regardless of which model powers them. The competitive battles between Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google will continue. But on the question of how to make AI assistants reliably good at specialized work, the industry has quietly converged on an answer -- and it came from the company that gave it away.

Anthropic makes agent Skills an open-standard - SiliconANGLE

Anthropic PBC said today it's updating its Skills feature, which enables companies to teach its powerful large language model how to perform very specific, work-related tasks. The update comes as the artificial intelligence industry doubles-down on so-called AI agents, which are AI systems designed to work autonomously with minimal human supervision. As part of today's update, Anthropic said it's making the Agent Skills specification an open standard, making it easier for anyone to share and deploy new skills. The company first launched Skills for Claude in October. They're a new method for developing specialized AI agents using files and folders. Those folders include instructions, resources and scripts that Claude and other LLMs can leverage to perform specific tasks. For instance, if a worker wants Claude to create an Excel spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation, they can direct it to open a folder with special skills for those tools, so it will know exactly how to use them to complete the objective. Users can also make their own changes to these skills folders, adding files that describe processes such as browsing a website or filling out a specific kind of form, in order to teach agents new things they haven't come across before. Anthropic's Skills are there to make AI agents more capable, and can even teach them how to run new software without having to talk to another tool or agent. With today's update, Anthropic is adding a new organization-wide management capability, which makes it possible for enterprises subscribed to Claude's Team and Enterprise plans to manage Skills from a central location. The decision to make Skills an open standard is perhaps the most significant change, though. This move follows the success of Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, which is an open standard for AI agents to communicate with each other and utilize third-party tools. MCP has become the de facto communication standard for the agentic AI industry, and earlier this month, control of the project was officially handed over to the Linux Foundation A simpler update makes Skills more accessible to Claude subscribers within the Tools sidebar. Anthropic described this as "quick-create flow - just describe what you want, and Claude builds it." Finally, the company has also created a directory of "partner-built skills" that includes contributions from the likes of Atlassian Corp., Canva Pty. Ltd., Notion Labs Inc., Figma Inc., Cloudflare Inc., Stripe Inc. and Zapier Inc. Anthropic said the new partner skills can be used in various ways. For instance, they can help AI agents to apply brand style guidelines to marketing materials created in Figma, create tasks in Atlassian's Jira and Trello platforms, and so on. This library of third-party skills is expected to grow significantly over time as more partners experiment with the new, open standard, Anthropic said.