Introducing Agent Skills

Update: We've added organization-wide management for skills , a directory featuring partner-built skills, and published Agent Skills as an open standard for cross-platform portability. (December 18, 2025)

Claude can now use Skills to improve how it performs specific tasks. Skills are folders that include instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude can load when needed.

Claude will only access a skill when it's relevant to the task at hand. When used, skills make Claude better at specialized tasks like working with Excel or following your organization's brand guidelines.

Think of Skills as custom onboarding materials that let you package expertise, making Claude a specialist on what matters most to you. For a technical deep-dive on the Agent Skills design pattern, architecture, and development best practices, read our engineering blog.

Creating skills is simple. The "skill-creator" skill provides interactive guidance: Claude asks about your workflow, generates the folder structure, formats the SKILL.md file, and bundles the resources you need. No manual file editing required.

Use Anthropic-created skills to have Claude read and generate professional Excel spreadsheets with formulas, PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, and fillable PDFs. Developers can create custom Skills to extend Claude's capabilities for their specific use cases.

Developers can also easily create, view, and upgrade skill versions through the Claude Console.

Skills extend Claude Code with your team's expertise and workflows. Install skills via plugins from the anthropics/skills marketplace. Claude loads them automatically when relevant. Share skills through version control with your team. You can also manually install skills by adding them to ~/.claude/skills . The Claude Agent SDK provides the same Agent Skills support for building custom agents.

You've already seen Skills at work in Claude apps, where Claude uses them to create files like spreadsheets and presentations. Now, you can build your own skills and use them across Claude apps, Claude Code, and our API.

While working on tasks, Claude scans available skills to find relevant matches. When one matches, it loads only the minimal information and files needed—keeping Claude fast while accessing specialized expertise.

Skills are available to Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise users. We provide skills for common tasks like document creation, examples you can customize, and the ability to create your own custom skills.