Anthropic debuts Skills for Claude to make it smarter at work

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AI agents have spent years living in the tech world’s version of limbo, hyped up in PowerPoints, demoed on stage, but rarely doing anything you’d actually call useful.

That’s changing fast. Companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are finally shifting from futuristic promises to practical tools, and Anthropic’s latest move is its biggest swing yet: Skills for Claude.

Skills are like cheat sheets for your AI coworker.

They’re folders packed with instructions, scripts, and resources that help Claude do specific jobs better, whether it’s crunching numbers in Excel, writing within your company’s brand voice, or generating slick PowerPoint decks.

Anthropic says users can even build custom Skills tailored to their own workflows, syncing them across Claude.ai, Claude Code, Anthropic’s API, and the Claude Agent SDK.

Big names like Box, Rakuten, and Canva are already giving it a spin.

The idea is simple but powerful: instead of wasting time crafting the perfect prompt or reminding Claude what you’re working on, you give it the Skills it needs once, and it remembers.

The feature is rolling out to Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise users.

Brad Abrams, Anthropic’s product lead, told The Verge that Skills are basically about agents, a way for organizations to teach Claude to actually perform in their own contexts, not just ace generic AI benchmarks.

“It’s about doing the task you need at your own company,” Abrams said. As proof, he had Claude whip up a presentation on how “Haiku 4.5 is doing in the market,” which, he noted, came out as “well-formatted slides that are easy to digest.”

This news drops just weeks after OpenAI’s own AgentKit reveal at DevDay, a set of tools meant to help companies and developers move agents from “cool demo” to “real product.”

In a showcase, OpenAI demonstrated grocery giant Albertsons using an agent to fix ice cream sales dips, while apps like Box, Canva, and Uber Eats joined the mix.