Agent Skills

Anthropic · 16 October 2025

Agent Skills lets Claude load task-specific folders of instructions, scripts and resources on demand, using progressive disclosure to save context.

A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md. Only its name and description sit in context at startup, the body loads when relevant, and extra files load only if needed. Works across Claude apps, Claude Code and the API (/v1/skills). Anthropic-managed skills cover PowerPoint, Excel, Word and PDF.

Date

Thursday, 16 October 2025

Lab

Anthropic

Kind

feature

Access

closed API

Published as an open standard on 2025-12-18 (agentskills.io). The Skills API left beta and went generally available on 2026-08-19.

Sources

1. claude.com/blog/skills
2. www.anthropic.com/engineering/equipping-agents-for-the-real-world-with-agent-skills
3. platform.claude.com/docs/en/release-notes/overview

This record was checked against its sources on 6 October 2026. How we check

Related

• Model Context Protocol (MCP)
• API agent toolkit: code execution, MCP connector, Files API, 1-hour cache