Anthropic just made a major play in the enterprise AI race with Skills for Claude - customizable folders packed with instructions that teach the AI to master specific workplace tasks. The move puts pressure on OpenAI after its recent AgentKit announcement and signals the battle for practical AI agents is heating up across corporate America.
The AI agent wars just got more practical. Anthropic dropped Skills for Claude on Thursday, marking its most aggressive push yet into workplace automation territory that OpenAI has been eyeing with increasing intensity.
Skills transforms Claude from a general chatbot into something closer to a personalized workplace assistant. Think of it as instruction folders that load automatically when you need them - whether you're wrestling with Excel spreadsheets or following your company's specific brand guidelines. The feature works across Claude.ai, Claude Code, Anthropic's API, and the Claude Agent SDK.
"The thing that's interesting to me about Skills is basically about agents," Brad Abrams, a product lead at Anthropic, told The Verge. He emphasized this isn't about hitting benchmark numbers - it's about getting real work done at your actual company.
The timing isn't coincidental. This comes weeks after OpenAI unveiled AgentKit at its annual DevDay event, complete with a flashy demo showing how Albertsons could use custom agents to boost ice cream sales. Both companies are racing to crack the same puzzle: making AI agents actually useful instead of just impressive in demos.
Early enterprise customers are already testing the waters. Box, Canva, and Rakuten have been putting Skills through its paces, according to Anthropic's release. Abrams demonstrated the potential by using Claude's PowerPoint Skill to generate a presentation about Haiku 4.5's market performance, creating "well-formatted slides that are easy to digest."
This represents a shift from the AI industry's obsession with benchmarks toward solving actual workplace friction. Instead of spending time crafting the perfect prompt every time you need something done, Skills lets you front-load that context and training.
The broader competitive landscape reveals just how high the stakes are. Google, , , and have been pouring resources into agentic AI for years, with executives regularly hyping the technology on earnings calls. But progress has been frustratingly incremental - think Computer Use feature or parade of agent announcements like Operator, Deep Research, and ChatGPT Agent.
