Agent Skills
Agent Skills, maintained by agentskills.io open standard (originated at Anthropic). A folder with a SKILL.md file (name, description, instructions) plus optional scripts, references and assets that agents load on demand. Status: Open format with a published specification at agentskills.io; adopted across many agent clients.
Fact sheet
| Name | Agent Skills |
|---|---|
| Maintainer | agentskills.io open standard (originated at Anthropic) |
| What it is | A folder with a SKILL.md file (name, description, instructions) plus optional scripts, references and assets that agents load on demand. |
| Status and version | Open format with a published specification at agentskills.io; adopted across many agent clients. |
| What it does not do | Does not execute anything by itself or expose remote tools; skills are instructions and files, often paired with an MCP server or CLI. |
Dated facts
- A skill is a folder containing SKILL.md with name and description at minimum. (agentskills.io, read 4 November 2026)
- Agents load skills by progressive disclosure: discovery (name and description), activation (full SKILL.md), execution. (agentskills.io, read 4 November 2026)
- The format was originally developed by Anthropic and released as an open standard. (agentskills.io, read 4 November 2026)
- Cloudflare's Agents SDK treats Agent Skills as files in the agent workspace (29 Oct 2026). (developers.cloudflare.com, dated 29 October 2026, read 4 November 2026)
- Mintlify exposes skill.md files as MCP resources. (www.mintlify.com, read 4 November 2026)
Seen in the shared crawl
| Path | Top 10,000 found | Ora leaderboard found |
|---|---|---|
/.well-known/agent-skills/index.json | 53 of 7,435 (0.71%) | 144 of 3,364 (4.28%) |
A path counts only when the answer is the right kind of document. Many sites answer these paths with an ordinary web page, which is not counted. See the census.