Anthropic is Transforming Skills into an Industry-Wide Standard for AI Agents

Quick Summary
This article explores how Anthropic pioneered the introduction of the "skill" concept into AI, driving its widespread adoption across the entire AI ecosystem, from Claude to GPT and Gemini. It analyzes the reasons behind the growing popularity of skills, evidenced by platforms like Skillsmp with over 500,000 skills and the adoption by major AI companies of the open standard SKILL.md. The article also guides users on how to effectively find and utilize skills on Skillsmp, provides reference materials for developing personal skills, and emphasizes that skills are not just a feature but a strategic investment in AI workflows to achieve consistency, scalability, and long-term efficiency.
Anthropic was the first to introduce the concept of skills into AI in a truly structured way. Interestingly, this skill concept is now spreading across the entire AI ecosystem, from how companies build agents to how individuals work with AI daily. From Claude to GPT, from Gemini to emerging agent tools, skills are gradually becoming the common language the entire industry is moving towards.
If you're unfamiliar with what skills are in Claude, you can refer to this article first: Claude Agent Skills are essential skills to know about AI in 2026.
Why are skills rapidly expanding within the AI community?
The numbers behind this trend speak volumes. Skillsmp, currently the largest skill aggregation platform, has compiled over 500k skills from GitHub, all compatible with Claude Code, Codex CLI, and ChatGPT. The community-built Antigravity Awesome Skills library currently boasts over 1,272 skills, with 24k GitHub stars and over 4.2k forks. Anthropic's official frontend-design skill is currently the most installed skill, with over 277k installations as of March 2026.
How are major AI companies approaching skills?
Each major platform is addressing this challenge in its own way, but all are aiming for the same goal: helping AI understand users once for complete reusability later.
In December 2025, Anthropic announced the open standard for Agent Skills, and OpenAI quickly adopted the same format for Codex CLI and ChatGPT shortly thereafter. As of early 2026, the SKILL.md standard is supported on Claude, Claude Code, Manus, Cursor, VS Code, GitHub Copilot, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, and many other platforms. This means that a skill can be used across almost all popular AI tools, without being locked into a single platform.
Naturally, major companies like Google, HashiCorp, Vercel, and Stripe are also participating, having announced official skills for their own platforms using the same Skill.md format.
What is Skillsmp and how to find suitable skills?
Skillsmp is an independent community platform, not affiliated with Anthropic, specializing in aggregating skills from public GitHub repositories with smart filters by category, author, and popularity. This is the best starting point if you want to find skills for a specific domain without having to scour GitHub outside of Anthropic's official platform.
Using Skillsmp is actually very simple: search by keywords for the task you want to automate, filter by GitHub stars to ensure quality, and review the skill's description and activation conditions before installing. All skills on Skillsmp use the open SKILL.md standard and are hosted on GitHub, so users don't need to worry about compatibility.
One point to note: skills on Skillsmp are filtered for a minimum of 2 GitHub stars and scanned for basic quality indicators, but you should review them carefully before installation as they are community-sourced code.
For example, our team searched for a writer skill on Skillsmp and found the seo-content-writer from Antigravity Awesome Skills. This works quite well for English but does not yet support Vietnamese, especially Vietnamese E-E-A-T standards. Therefore, if you use it frequently, you should modify that skill for your work rather than creating one from scratch.

References
If you're interested in creating your own skills, Anthropic has published official documentation providing a complete guide on how to build skills for Claude. This is currently the most official and accurate reference source.
- 📄 Original English document from Anthropic: Google Drive link here
- 📄 Vietnamese translation: Google Drive link here

Skills are not features; they are an investment in workflows
The shift from prompts to skills is happening not because skills are a novelty, but because they correctly address the challenges faced by those working with AI in practice: consistency, scalability, and not having to start from scratch every day.
Anthropic is leading this trend, replacing OpenAI and Google, but the entire industry is moving in the same direction. Investing in building good skills today not only helps you work more efficiently with Claude but also provides a foundational mindset for working better with any AI platform in the future.



