Anthropic PBC wants to make artificial intelligence agents more effective when it comes to doing real work, and its latest idea is to provide them with additional “skills” that can help them when assigned a very specific task.

The company announced Skills for Claude today, explaining that it’s a tool that comes with various folders that include “instructions, scripts and resources for Claude” that can be loaded up when necessary. For instance, if Claude is told to create an Excel spreadsheet or a PowerPoint presentation, it can access a special skill for those tools and use them more effectively.

Users will also be able to create their own Skills for Claude and make the large language model better able to perform specific work that might have to take into account things like brand guidelines, the company said. The Skills can be used with Claude.ai, Claude Code, the Claude Agent software development kit and the Anthropic application programming interface.

In a deep-dive blog post, Anthropic explained that Claude will only access the Skills when they’re relevant to whatever task it has been instructed to perform. The Skills are meant to help it perform more specialized work using specific tools or guidelines, and will be ignored when not needed. In other words, they help make Claude “better” at doing something.

The idea is that by giving Claude special Skills, users won’t have to be so specific when it comes to prompting the agent, or refer to previous context each time they’re trying to tell it what they need it to do.

Anthropic said that Skills, which are available now to Pro, Team, Max and Enterprise subscribers, can be thought of as “custom onboarding materials that let you package expertise,” so as to transform Claude into an expert at the tasks that matter most to users.

Anthropic Product Lead Brad Abrams told The Verge in an interview that he loaded up Claude’s PowerPoint skill and instructed it to create a presentation that shows how the company’s Haiku 4.5 model is performing in the market compared with competing models. He said it created a number of “well-formatted slides that are easy to digest.” Other kinds of Skills pertain to creating PDF files, Word files, canvas design, image editing and writing code in specific programming languages.

The company hopes that Skills for Claude will help to make AI agents more powerful and useful, and encourage businesses to use them more often, so they ultimately become more reliant on them over time. It’s a goal that’s shared by other AI companies, including Google LLC and OpenAI, which are also focused on agentic AI productivity.

OpenAI made a similar move recently with the launch of its AgentKit earlier this month, saying that it’s a group of tools that will help enterprises “take agents from prototype to production.” The company showed how the U.S. grocery chain Albertsons Companies Inc. was able to build a custom agent based on its corporate data that was able to develop a marketing plan to improve ice cream sales at its more than 2,000 stores.

Image: Anthropic