Steal Anthropic's Own Claude Skills

Anthropic put its own reference Claude skills in a public repo, and it is one of the better ways to learn the format by reading real examples instead of guessing. The repo is anthropics/skills on GitHub. It holds the skills Anthropic uses to demonstrate the Agent Skills format, plus the spec and a starter template. If you build with Claude and you want your agent to handle a repeatable task the same way every time, this is the source material to copy from.

A skill is a folder. Inside it sits a file called SKILL.md with two parts: YAML frontmatter at the top (a name and a description) and markdown instructions below it. Claude reads the description to decide when the skill applies, then loads the full instructions only when the task matches. That is the whole trick. You write the procedure once, Claude pulls it in on demand, and you stop re-explaining the same workflow every session. A skill folder can also carry scripts and other resource files the instructions reference.

What is actually in the repo

Three top-level pieces: a skills directory with working examples, a spec directory describing the Agent Skills standard, and a template directory you copy to start your own. The examples cover a real spread of tasks, so you can find one close to what you are building and study how it is structured.

• Document skills: docx, pdf, pptx, and xlsx. These power Claude's document handling and are the heavyweight reference implementations. Note they are source-available, not open source, unlike most of the repo.
• Creative and design: algorithmic-art, brand-guidelines, canvas-design, theme-factory, frontend-design, slack-gif-creator.
• Development and technical: mcp-builder, web-artifacts-builder, webapp-testing, claude-api.
• Workflow and authoring: skill-creator (a skill for building skills), doc-coauthoring, internal-comms.

Install them in Claude Code

The skills ship as two plugin bundles through a marketplace you register once. After that you install the bundle you want and call the skill by mentioning it in a normal request, for example asking Claude to use the PDF skill to pull form fields out of a file. The README groups them as document-skills and example-skills.

1. 1Register the marketplace: run /plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills inside Claude Code.
2. 2Install a bundle directly with /plugin install document-skills@anthropic-agent-skills or /plugin install example-skills@anthropic-agent-skills.
3. 3Or browse interactively: /plugin, choose Browse and install plugins, pick anthropic-agent-skills, then document-skills or example-skills, then Install now.
4. 4Trigger a skill by describing the task in plain language. Claude matches it against the skill description and loads the instructions when relevant.

These same example skills are already available on paid Claude.ai plans, and you can use skills through the Claude API as well. If you would rather author your own from scratch, copy the template directory: a SKILL.md with name and description frontmatter, then your instructions, examples, and guidelines below. The skill-creator skill in the repo walks Claude through building one with you, which is a faster path than a blank file.

When to reach for it, and what to check

Use these as a teacher and a starting point, not a finished product. Anthropic states plainly that the skills are for demonstration and education, and that what Claude actually does may differ from what a given skill shows. So read them, adapt the pattern to your own workflow, and test against your real inputs before you depend on the behavior. Watch the licensing too: most of the repo is Apache 2.0, but the docx, pdf, pptx, and xlsx skills are source-available with different terms, which matters if you plan to redistribute. Best return on your time is the spec and skill-creator. Learn the format properly once and every skill you write afterward gets cheaper.