Overview of Agent Skills: What You Need to Know

A simple, open format to provide agents with new capabilities and expertise.

Agent Skills are directories containing instructions, scripts, and resources that agents can explore and use to perform tasks more accurately and efficiently.

Why Do We Need Agent Skills?

Agents are increasingly capable, but often lack the necessary context to reliably perform the actual job. Skills address this problem by providing agents with access to process knowledge and context specific to the company, team, and users, which they can load on demand. Agents gain access to a skill set that can expand their capabilities based on the task at hand.

• For skill creators : Build capabilities once and deploy them across multiple agent products.
• For compatible agents : Skill support allows end users to instantly provide agents with new capabilities.
• For teams and businesses : Capture organizational knowledge in portable, version-controlled packages.

How Can Agent Skills Help?

• Field expertise : Packaging specialized knowledge into reusable guides, from legal review processes to data analysis pipelines.
• New capabilities : Provide agents with new abilities (e.g., creating presentations, building MCP servers, analyzing datasets).
• Repeatable workflows : Transform multi-step tasks into consistent and auditable workflows.
• Interoperability : Reuse the same skill across agent products compatible with various other skills.

Application

Agent Skills is powered by leading AI development tools.

Open Development

The Agent Skills format, originally developed by Anthropic, was released as an open standard and has been adopted by an increasing number of agent products. This standard is open to contributions from the broader ecosystem.