Open Standard Announcement
On December 18 2025, Anthropic released the Agent Skills specification as an open standard with a reference SDK. This open‑standard approach encourages cross‑agent portability and has already been adopted by tools like VS Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor and others.
What are Agent skills?
Agent Skills is an open format for giving agents new capabilities and expertise. Skills are folders of instructions, scripts and resources that agents can discover and use to perform tasks more accurately and efficiently.
Why Agent Skills?
Agents often lack the context needed to perform work reliably. Skills provide access to procedural knowledge and specific context that can be loaded on demand. This allows capabilities to be built once by skill authors and deployed across multiple agents. For agents, support for skills lets users give them new capabilities out of the box, and for teams, skills capture organizational knowledge in portable, version controlled packages.
What Skills Enable
- Domain expertise: Package specialized knowledge into reusable instructions.
- New capabilities: Provide new capabilities such as creating presentations, building MCP servers or analyzing datasets.
- Repeatable workflows: Transform multi-step tasks into consistent and auditable workflows.
Examples of Claude Skills Usage
Curated lists of Claude Skills to start exploring from:
- travisvn/awesome‑claude‑skills (https://github.com/travisvn/awesome-claude-skills)
- ComposioHQ/awesome‑claude‑skills (https://github.com/ComposioHQ/awesome-claude-skills)
- BehiSecc/awesome‑claude‑skills (https://github.com/BehiSecc/awesome-claude-skills)
- Awesome Claude Skills visual directory (https://awesomeclaude.ai/awesome-claude-skills)
- Claude Skills Marketplace (https://skillsmp.com)
Anthropic also provides pre built skills for creating presentations (pptx), spreadsheets (xlsx), documents (docx) and PDF reports (Agent Skills – Claude Docs).
MCP Bundler Skills Support
MCP Bundler has supported skills for several months. A key capability is exposing skills as MCP tools, enabling their use by non-native skill clients — all clients except Claude until recently.
This release significantly expands skills support by adding synchronization between Claude, MCP Bundler and Codex, with additional tools planned. Skills can now be organized into folders, and users can enable or disable skills for Claude or Codex with a single click, supporting more specialized and controlled workflows.