Amazon, Cursor, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Vercel have teamed up to create Agent Plugins, an open standard for AI agent extensions.\u00a0It defines a single package format that lets developers bundle and reuse extensions across platforms. Until now, every product has relied on its own formats, folder structures, and setup processes, forcing developers to rebuild their work for each one.<\/p>\n
The standard boils down to a directory with a manifest file called plugin.json. Version 1.0.0 supports two components.\u00a0Agent Skills<\/a>\u00a0handle reusable instructions and workflows.\u00a0MCP servers<\/a>\u00a0connect agents to tools and data.<\/p>\n The standard only covers packaging and discoverability. It doesn’t touch marketplaces, permissions, or runtime environments. The spec is being developed in the open on\u00a0GitHub<\/a>.<\/p>\n One notable absence from the group is Anthropic. The company created both the Model Context Protocol and Agent Skills as open standards and recently added its own plugin system to Cowork<\/a>, its desktop tool for agentic knowledge work. Yet it isn’t part of the Agent Plugins effort.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\tAI News Without the Hype \u2013 Curated by Humans<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive “AI Radar” frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n