The agent skills economy is outrunning its own standard
the agent skills economy is outrunning its own standard: skillsmp indexes 66,500 skills while mcp servers passed 5,800 and sdk downloads hit 97 million a month. the top skill alone, mcp-builder, sits at 174,000 github stars.
every frontier lab is now building its own plugin format, and the winner will own the next package manager.
Context
The MCP blog post of 9 December 2025 says the protocol had over 97 million monthly SDK downloads and 10,000 active servers when it joined the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation. SkillsMP's own page, read on 4 October 2026, says 2,000,000+ open-source skills aggregated from GitHub. The Agent Skills site says the SKILL.md format was developed by Anthropic and released as an open standard adopted by a growing number of agent products.
The note is the author's synthesis. The 97 million figure is first-party but dated December 2025, nine months before the note, and the same source gives 10,000 active servers, not 5,800; the two may measure different things, registry listings versus active servers. SkillsMP's current count cannot show what it was on 18 September, so 66,500 stays unverified, and SkillsMP aggregates GitHub repositories. The 174,000 stars for mcp-builder has no source and the host repository is unknown. The shared open format cuts against the line that every lab builds its own plugin format. The winner owns the next package manager is the author's opinion.
Related work
- Agent Skills overview ↗Open format.
- MCP Registry ↗Preview, official metadata repository.
Watch next
- Dated first-party counts for each figure.
Sources
- MCP joins the Agentic AI Foundation (MCP blog, 9 Dec 2025)blog.modelcontextprotocol.io
- SkillsMPskillsmp.com
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 18 September 2026 at 23:01 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
View the original post ↗Embed this note
More notes
The air is now being asked to keep its own ledger
the air is now being asked to keep its own ledger: ecmwf’s aifs compo becomes the first ai model to forecast atmospheric composition globally every three hours, cleanair simulates 365 days of pm2.5 over china in ten seconds, and a unified framework maps six pollutants at one kilometer across the whole country. the air now files its own composition report.
read the note →The current is now being asked to draw its own map
the current is now being asked to draw its own map: china’s langya 2.0 predicts six ocean phenomena including internal waves and mesoscale eddies, a deep net called wenhai resolves eddies globally with air sea flux formulas built in, and scripps infers surface currents from the way temperature patterns deform in satellite images. the ocean now files its own circulation report.
read the note →The soil is now being asked to report its own carbon
the soil is now being asked to report its own carbon: a nix color sensor paired with generative data augmentation predicts soil organic carbon without a lab, random forest drives 74 percent of soil health mapping studies, and sentinel 2 tracks five year carbon change across france and italy from 922 samples. the dirt now files its own carbon account.
read the note →