Anthropic Official Skills
The official Agent Skills repo from Anthropic — 19 reference skills for Claude
About
This is Anthropic's official skills repository (anthropics/skills) — distinct from the community anthropics-skills pack already in the catalog. It publishes the Agent Skills Anthropic builds and endorses for Claude: folders of SKILL.md instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude loads dynamically to get better at specialized tasks. It ships 19 real skills across creative & design (algorithmic-art, canvas-design, frontend-design, theme-factory), development & technical (mcp-builder, webapp-testing, web-artifacts-builder, skill-creator, claude-api), enterprise & communication (brand-guidelines, internal-comms, doc-coauthoring, academy-guide, slack-gif-creator), and document creation (docx, pdf, pptx, xlsx — the same reference implementations behind Claude's document features). It also contains the Agent Skills specification (spec/) and a starter template. Licensing is mixed: many skills are Apache 2.0, but the document skills are source-available only — check each skill. The repo explicitly positions these as demonstration/educational reference implementations, and on Claude.ai they require a paid plan.
What it can do
- • 19 official reference skills: document creation/editing (docx, pdf, pptx, xlsx), web app testing, MCP server builder, frontend design, canvas design, algorithmic art, theme factory, web artifacts builder
- • Enterprise & communication skills: brand guidelines, internal comms, document co-authoring, academy guide, Slack GIF creator
- • Claude API skill + skill-creator meta-skill for authoring new skills
- • The Agent Skills specification (spec/) — the open standard behind the format, usable as reference for other agents
- • Starter template for building custom skills (folder + SKILL.md with YAML frontmatter)
Setup
- In Claude Code, register the repo as a plugin marketplace: run
/plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills. - Install a skill set: choose "Browse and install plugins", select
anthropic-agent-skills, thendocument-skillsorexample-skills, and Install — or directly:/plugin install document-skills@anthropic-agent-skills(orexample-skills@anthropic-agent-skills). - Use a skill by mentioning it in conversation, e.g. "Use the PDF skill to extract the form fields from path/to/file.pdf".
- On Claude.ai (paid plans), these skills are already available; custom uploads follow Claude's "Using skills" support guide.
- Via the Claude API: use Anthropic's pre-built skills or upload custom ones — see the Skills API Quickstart (docs.claude.com skills guide).
- To author your own: copy the
template/folder in this repo (a folder with aSKILL.mdcontaining YAML frontmatter + instructions) or use theskill-creatorskill.
Prerequisites
Claude Code (for the plugin marketplace flow), or a paid Claude.ai plan, or Claude API access for the Skills API. No install beyond the plugin/add step; skills are Markdown + scripts, so nothing to compile.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 9/10
Scored 9/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: 180,712 GitHub stars (log-scaled vs catalog peers); last push 3d ago; 0 releases/12mo; 1401 open issues. Manual review: official anthropics/skills repo verified (19 real skills); demo/educational disclaimer; Claude.ai needs paid plan. License: mixed: Apache-2.0 for many skills, source-available for docx/pdf/pptx/xlsx, no repo-level LICENSE.
★ 180,712 GitHub stars
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 9.6/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 7.6/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 7.9/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 9.0/10
- · 180,712 GitHub stars (log-scaled vs catalog peers)
- · last push 3d ago; 0 releases/12mo; 1401 open issues
- · manual review: official anthropics/skills repo verified (19 real skills); demo/educational disclaimer; Claude.ai needs paid plan
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.