The AI giants have joined forces to ask developers to write their agentic skills and tools into the same format, enabling capabilities to move easily from one platform to another. Vercel posted the initial draft of the Agent Plugins spec on Thursday, with input from Amazon, Cursor, Microsoft, and OpenAI, which pledged fidelity and engineers to the project. It was quickly embraced by the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), though it will operate as an independent entity. Agent Plugins 1.0 packages an AI agent’s skills and tools in a single directory structure, building on the AAIF-stewarded MCP protocol and the open Agent Skills standard originally created by Anthropic in 2025. Agent Skills holds instructions for how the agent should perform a specific task, while MCP provides connectivity to outside databases, APIs, shell scripts, and other external resources. The spec prescribes creating a top-level directory for each plug-in, with a small manifest and schema, with skills filed in the skills sub-directory and MCP server configuration stored as an mcp.json file. Plugin authors can also use the namespace directory to store additional extensions. The keepers of the spec deliberately kept the scope “narrow” for this 1.0 release, with the best extensions possibly considered for future versions. Thus far, VS Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Codex, and Kiro all support the standard. Going forward, Agent Plugins