Anthropic launches Agent Skills

Anthropic launched Agent Skills, a way of packaging instructions, scripts and other resources into folders that Claude can load on demand to specialise in a particular task, such as working with a specific file format or following an organisation’s brand guidelines. Rather than keeping such instructions permanently in context, Claude scans available skills and loads only what a given task needs, which Anthropic said kept the model fast while still giving it access to specialised expertise.

Anthropic described skills as composable — multiple skills can stack together on one task — and portable, designed to behave the same way whether invoked in Claude.ai, in Claude Code, or through the Messages API, which added a dedicated skills endpoint for version management. Skills shipped with partner integrations from Box, Canva, Notion and Rakuten covering tasks such as turning files into presentations or spreadsheets and streamlining finance workflows, and were available at launch to Claude.ai’s Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise tiers.

The launch was part of a broader industry move, alongside Anthropic’s own Model Context Protocol and OpenAI’s function-calling and tool ecosystems, toward standardising how models are extended with external capability rather than relying purely on longer context windows or larger base models. Anthropic later opened Skills as a cross-platform standard beyond its own products in December 2025.