The Genius of Anthropic's Agent Skills

Agent Skills sound like a leap ahead for AI Agents for companies and B2B customers.

Good Morning,

Anthropic overtakes OpenAI in ARR either in 2027 or 2028, and the reason is the utility it is providing Enterprise customers and businesses all over the world. On October 16th, 2025 Anthpric announced Claude Skills.

What are Claude Skills?

Claude Skills are a new feature introduced by Anthropic for its Claude AI models, launched in October 2025, designed to customize and extend Claude’s capabilities for specialized tasks and workflows.

It’s a genius way to get free users to convert to paid as well.

Skills are how you turn your institutional knowledge into automatic workflows.

So why is this so useful? These Claude Skills are essentially task-focused capability packs.

Anthropic is Ramping up Agentic AI will Skills

This makes Claude Code infinitely more viable and attractive. Anthropic’s Agent Skills thus offer a way to instill Claude with specific knowledge that it may not possess in its distillation of training data. Anthropic has already deployed a few of them within Claude to handle common tasks like creating spreadsheets or presentations.

As relevant as MCP, Anthropic’s Skills can Scale

• Definition of Skills: Skills are folders containing instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude loads dynamically to enhance performance on specialized tasks, such as creating branded documents or analyzing data with specific workflows.

• Availability: Skills are in feature preview for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans (requiring code execution enabled) and in beta for Claude Code users and API users with the code execution tool.

• Dynamic Loading Mechanism: Skills use progressive disclosure, where Claude reviews available Skills for a task, loads only relevant ones to avoid context overload, and applies their instructions for consistency and speed.

• Anthropic Skills: These are pre-built by Anthropic for tasks like enhanced document creation in Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and PDF; they are available to all users and invoked automatically when relevant.

• Custom Skills: Users or organizations create these for domain-specific workflows, such as applying brand guidelines, generating email templates, structuring meeting notes, or automating tasks in tools like JIRA or Asana.

• Performance Improvement: Skills boost Claude’s consistency, speed, and accuracy on specialized tasks by supplementing general knowledge with targeted procedures.

• Knowledge Capture: Skills package organizational workflows, best practices, and institutional knowledge for consistent use across teams.

• Ease of Customization: Simple Skills require only Markdown instructions (no coding), while advanced ones can include executable scripts.

• Vs. Projects: Unlike Projects’ static background knowledge loaded in specific chats, Skills offer dynamic, task-activated procedures usable everywhere in Claude.

• Vs. Other Features: Skills provide task-specific procedural guidance (complementing MCP for tool access and differing from broad Custom Instructions) for specialized workflows.

Anthropic actually released several blogs articles about Agent Skills and several YouTube videos, so it clearly has a lot riding on this as it expands globally.

Anthropic is Iterating Faster around Coding and Agents in 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.

While OpenAI ramps up AI Infrastructure partnerships and hype, Anthropic is doubling down on product fit for Enterprise AI and utility.

OpenAI’s list of Vendor and Partner Financing Deals is Long, Wacky and Confusing

Some are already trying to make the argument that Agent Skills might be more important than MCP, but it’s not a protocol, it’s just a way to make AI agents more useful.

Enterprise AI are using Anthropic’s AI Coding leading Models

The system marks a fundamental shift in how organizations can customize AI assistants, moving beyond one-off prompts to reusable packages of domain expertise that work consistently across an entire company. If this is as good as it sounds, it might make agents way more effective for repetitive tasks.

So for instance, people can also build their own Skills for Claude relative to their specific jobs and use them across Claude.ai, Claude Code, Anthropic’s API, and the Claude Agent SDK. Box, Rakuten, and Canva have already used the tool, according to the release.

Custom Skills

These are Skills you or your organization create for specialized workflows and domain-specific tasks. Here are some potential workflows you could enable using custom Skills:

• Apply brand style guidelines to documents and presentations.

• Generate communications following company email templates.

• Structure meeting notes with company-specific formats.

• Create tasks in company tools (JIRA, Asana, Linear) following team conventions.

• Execute company-specific data analysis workflows.

• Automate personal workflows and customize Claude to match your work style.

I like the real-world implications here. While OpenAI is trying to make ChatGPT into an Operating System of mini-apps, Anthropic is much more customer-centric in its approach to serving its customers.

Around the same time Anthropic announced Claude Haiku 4.5 showing the evolution of smaller LLMs that can do more and fast.

Anthropic’s more pragmatic approach to Enterprise AI and Agentic AI comes with a reputation of being the best models at coding. Claude Code has already had a tremendous 2025.

Claude is powerful, but real work requires procedural knowledge and organizational context. Introducing Agent Skills, a new way to build specialized agents using files and folders.

• Here is what people and developers had to say about Agent Skills on Hacker News.

The Key Point?

Agent skills will augment how companies use Claude. Because, Skills as a feature essentially provides organizations building agents a way to teach Claude to do a good job “in their specific context.” - The Verge.

This enables Agents to scale at particular tasks at particular organizations.

Here we are talking about ROI and Enterprise utility in business outcomes.

According to Anthropic itself:

Key Benefits

• Improvement in Claude’s performance of specific tasks: Skills provide specialized capabilities for tasks like document creation, data analysis, and domain-specific work that requires supplementing Claude’s general knowledge.

• Organizational knowledge capture: Package your company’s workflows, best practices, and institutional knowledge for Claude to use consistently across your team.

• Easy customization: Anyone can create Skills by writing instructions in Markdown—no coding required for simple Skills, though you can attach executable scripts to custom Skills for more advanced functionality.

• Agent Skills might enable Agents Enterprise customers build to become more autonomous.

Anthropic is building the protocols and scaffolding necessary to enable AI agents to succeed in the real world over time. Remember how this scales:

Skills are:

• Composable: Skills stack together. Claude automatically identifies which skills are needed and coordinates their use.

• Portable: Skills use the same format everywhere. Build once, use across Claude apps, Claude Code, and API.

• Efficient: Only loads what’s needed, when it’s needed.

• Powerful: Skills can include executable code for tasks where traditional programming is more reliable than token generation.

Anthropic’s revenue trajectory — potentially reaching $26 billion in 2026 from an estimated $9 billion by year-end 2025 — suggests the company is successfully converting enterprise interest into paying customers.

Curiously Anthropic’s Agent Skills feels more scalable than OpenAI’s AgentKit. Anthropic’s ARR trajectory suggests they are growing faster than OpenAI at the same company age with a higher growth rate as the company scales globally as the major Enterprise AI leader of the Generative AI era.

At this point Anthropic has is own lingo around its products and this might help you visualize what each does a bit better and how Agent Skills augments existing frameworks:

Comparing Skills to other Claude capabilities

Skills vs. Projects

Projects provide static background knowledge that’s always loaded when you start chats within them. Skills provide specialized procedures that activate dynamically when needed and work everywhere across Claude.

Skills vs. MCP (Model Context Protocol)

MCP connects Claude to external services and data sources. Skills provide procedural knowledge—instructions for how to complete specific tasks or workflows. You can use both together: MCP connections give Claude access to tools, while Skills teach Claude how to use those tools effectively.

Skills vs. Custom Instructions

Custom instructions apply broadly to all your conversations. Skills are task-specific and only load when relevant, making them better for specialized workflows.

Anyways I hope this gives you some valuable context. I know it’s a bit peculiar to read. Basically Anthropic is building products that it believes can best utilize Generative AI to accelerate value for companies.

Read more about Agent Skills on Claude Docs.

Skills automate prompts for organizations too.

Think about it:

• Skills addresses a real pain point: the “prompt engineering” problem where effective AI usage depends on individual employees crafting elaborate instructions for routine tasks, with no way to share that expertise across teams.

• Skills transforms implicit knowledge into explicit, shareable assets. For startups and developers, the feature could accelerate product development significantly — adding sophisticated document generation capabilities that previously required dedicated engineering teams and weeks of development.

All of which are pretty useful. As LLMs get better AI agents will have more agility with skills and accumulated knowledge with how to handle tasks. I can see a valid path for how this scales into generalized utility for companies of all sizes. I don’t have the same impression with OpenAI’s version of this.

Agent Skills are supported today across Claude.ai, Claude Code, the Claude Agent SDK, and the Claude Developer Platform.