Agent Skills: A New Open Standard for Giving AI Agents Context and Capabilities

AI agents are getting smarter every day, but they still struggle with one fundamental problem: context. Even the most capable models often lack the specific knowledge and procedural understanding needed to tackle real-world tasks reliably. A new open standard called Agent Skills aims to solve this by giving agents access to reusable packages of instructions, scripts, and resources they can load on demand.

The Context Problem in AI Agents

Modern AI agents can write code, analyze data, and even create presentations, but they frequently fall short when asked to perform specialized tasks that require domain expertise or company-specific knowledge. The issue isn't intelligence—it's context. Agents need access to procedural knowledge, workflows, and organizational specifics that aren't part of their general training.

Agent Skills addresses this gap by creating a standardized way to package and distribute this contextual knowledge. Think of it as giving agents a library of specialized skills they can browse and load depending on the task at hand.

What Are Agent Skills?

Agent Skills are essentially folders containing instructions, scripts, and resources that agents can discover and use to work more accurately and efficiently. The format was originally developed by Anthropic and has since been released as an open standard, adopted by a growing number of agent products.

For skill authors, this means building capabilities once and deploying them across multiple agent products. For compatible agents, it enables end users to give agents new capabilities out of the box. For teams and enterprises, it provides a way to capture organizational knowledge in portable, version-controlled packages.

What Can Agent Skills Enable?

The applications are broad:

Domain expertise: Package specialized knowledge into reusable instructions, from legal review processes to data analysis pipelines. An agent could load a legal review skill when examining contracts, or a data analysis skill when working with datasets.

New capabilities: Give agents entirely new abilities, such as creating presentations, building MCP servers, or analyzing datasets. These aren't just prompts—they're structured workflows with scripts and resources.

Repeatable workflows: Turn multi-step tasks into consistent and auditable workflows. This is particularly valuable for business processes that need to be performed the same way every time.

Interoperability: Reuse the same skill across different skills-compatible agent products. Once a skill is created, it can work with any agent that supports the standard.

Open Development and Adoption

The Agent Skills format is open to contributions from the broader ecosystem, and it's already supported by leading AI development tools. This open approach ensures that the standard can evolve based on real-world needs rather than being locked down by a single vendor.

Getting Started

For those interested in exploring Agent Skills, there are several resources available:

• What are skills?: Learn about skills, how they work, and why they matter
• Specification: The complete format specification for SKILL.md files
• Integrate skills: Add skills support to your agent or tool
• Example skills: Browse example skills on GitHub
• Reference library: Validate skills and generate prompt XML

Why This Matters

As AI agents become more integrated into workflows and business processes, the ability to give them context-specific knowledge becomes increasingly important. Agent Skills provides a standardized, open way to do this, making it easier for organizations to capture and share their institutional knowledge while giving agents the tools they need to perform real work reliably.

The open nature of the standard also means it can adapt to new use cases as they emerge, rather than being limited by proprietary formats or vendor lock-in. This could be a significant step toward making AI agents more practical and reliable for everyday business use.

For more information, visit the Agent Skills GitHub repository to explore the specification and contribute to the standard.