Anthropic Agent Skills

The anthropics/skills repository is Anthropic's official, public collection of Agent Skills for Claude: ready-made folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude loads dynamically to work more reliably on specialized tasks. Instead of re-explaining every time how a document should look under corporate branding or how a web app should be tested for UI bugs, a skill captures that knowledge once in a SKILL.md file — Claude picks it up automatically once it recognizes the matching task.

What's in the repository

Per the provider, the collection spans three areas: creative applications such as algorithmic art, music, and design, technical tasks such as testing web applications or building custom MCP servers, and enterprise workflows for communications and brand guidelines. Specifically included are academy-guide, algorithmic-art, brand-guidelines, canvas-design, discernment-nudge, doc-coauthoring, frontend-design, internal-comms, mcp-builder, skill-creator, slack-gif-creator, theme-factory, web-artifacts-builder, and webapp-testing. The repository also includes the document skills docx, pdf, pptx, and xlsx — per the provider, the same skills that power Claude's document capabilities internally.

License

Most skills are licensed under Apache-2.0 and are therefore fully open source. An exception is the four document skills docx, pdf, pptx, and xlsx: per the provider, these are "source-available" — viewable, but not released under an open license. Anthropic shares them as a reference for complex skills actively used in production, without releasing them for free reuse.

Installation and usage

In Claude Code, the repository can be registered directly as a plugin marketplace:

/plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills

Two plugin bundles are then available: document-skills (the four document skills) and example-skills (all other example skills), installable via /plugin install document-skills@anthropic-agent-skills or /plugin install example-skills@anthropic-agent-skills. After installation, simply describing the desired task in natural language — for example, "use the PDF skill to extract the form fields from this file" — is enough for Claude Code to activate the matching skill automatically. On claude.ai, the example skills are already preinstalled for paid plans; via the Claude API, both the pre-built and custom, self-written skills can be uploaded and used.

Creating your own skills

Per the provider, a skill at its core is just a folder with a SKILL.md file whose YAML frontmatter requires two fields: a unique name and a description explaining what the skill does and when it should apply. The template skill included in the repository serves as a starting point for building your own.

Provider's security note

Anthropic explicitly notes that these skills are provided for demonstration and educational purposes. Claude's actual behavior may differ from the implementations shown, and every skill should be thoroughly tested in your own environment before relying on it for production use.

Who benefits from this repository

The collection is especially valuable for anyone building their own skills and looking for proven patterns, for teams wanting to put the included document or testing skills to direct production use, and for anyone wanting to understand exactly how Claude's skill system works — with fully viewable source code instead of a pure black-box description.