Vercel, OpenAI and AWS launch Agent Plugins 1.0 standard, without Anthropic

Vercel, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Anysphere’s Cursor, GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI released Agent Plugins 1.0.0 on Aug. 6, 2026, an open vendor-neutral standard for packaging AI agent extensions. A plugin built once runs across compatible clients.

The format bundles Agent Skills and Model Context Protocol (MCP) server configurations into a single portable package. Notably absent is Anthropic, which created both MCP and Agent Skills — a sign the emerging agent-tooling stack is fragmenting along competitive lines.

Per Vercel’s introduction of Agent Plugins, a plugin is a directory with a plugin.json manifest that requires only $schema and name fields at minimum. Skills and an mcp.json file sit in fixed locations, a namespaced folder holds client-specific extensions, and one broken component does not disable the rest.

Launch-compatible clients include ChatGPT, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Kiro and VS Code. A technical steering committee with core maintainers from AWS, Cursor, Microsoft, OpenAI and Vercel governs the spec, which covers packaging and discoverability only — not marketplaces, permissions or runtime environments.

Whether the standard gains ground may hinge on Anthropic, whose MCP is already widely adopted across agent tools. Without its backing, developers face competing ways to ship the same extensions.