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. Credit: VentureBeat made with Midjourney 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." Inside the technology that teaches AI assistants to do specialized work 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. Fortune 500 companies are already using skills in legal, finance, and accounting 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." Atlassian, Figma, Stripe, and Zapier join Anthropic's skills directory at launch 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...

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