Anthropic today introduced Agent Skills for Claude, a system that lets the model load folders of instructions, scripts, and resources only when relevant to a task. The company says skills are composable, portable across Claude apps, Claude Code, and the API, and efficient because they pull in only the minimal information needed. The feature is available to Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise users in the Claude apps, and developers can add skills to Messages API requests through a new /v1/skills endpoint, which requires the Code Execution Tool beta.

Skills package expertise for specialized work like generating Excel files with formulas, building PowerPoint decks, following brand guidelines, or handling document workflows. Anthropic says Claude automatically scans for relevant skills and invokes them without manual selection, and users can build custom skills with guidance from a skill-creator skill. Box, Canva, Rakuten, Notion, and other partners have already put Skills to work, according to the company.

The launch lands in a crowded field. OpenAI announced AgentKit at its DevDay earlier this month, and both companies are racing to show that agents can do more than demo well. Brad Abrams, a product lead at Anthropic, told The Verge that Skills is fundamentally about agents and about letting organizations teach Claude to do a good job in their specific context, not about hitting arbitrary benchmarks. He demonstrated by having Claude generate a presentation about Haiku 4.5’s market performance using an Anthropic layer on top of the PowerPoint Skill.

Anthropic says it is working toward simplified skill creation workflows and enterprise-wide deployment capabilities.