Manus AI Embraces Open Standards: Integrating Agent Skills to Usher in a New Chapter for Agents
From General Assistant to Specialized Expert
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents are rapidly evolving from general-purpose digital assistants into powerful tools capable of handling complex, specialized tasks. However, elevating a generalist agent to an expert level in a specific domain requires a vast amount of context, procedural knowledge, and specialized skills. To address this challenge, Anthropic has introduced Agent Skills, an open standard designed to provide AI agents with modular, reusable capabilities.
At Manus AI, we are dedicated to building the most powerful and flexible general-purpose AI agent. We firmly believe that open standards are key to driving technological progress. Therefore, we are thrilled to announce that Manus AI will fully integrate the Agent Skills open standard, taking our capabilities to a new level and unlocking unprecedented possibilities for our users.
What are Agent Skills?
Agent Skills are an innovative approach that packages expertise, workflows, and best practices into reusable, file-system-based resources. You can think of them as an "onboarding guide for new employees." Unlike one-off, lengthy conversational instructions, Skills can be discovered and loaded by an AI agent on demand, transforming a generalist agent into an expert capable of handling specific tasks.
The core advantages of this architecture are:
•Specialization: Customize capabilities for specific domains, such as legal review, financial analysis, or branded content creation.
•Reusability: Create once and use automatically across multiple conversations, projects, and even different compatible AI agent products.
•Composability: Combine multiple independent Skills to build powerful workflows that can handle complex, multi-step tasks.
The Core User Value of Skills
We believe that integrating Skills will bring two major benefits to our users:
1. Solidify Personal Best Practices and Boost Efficiency
In your daily work, you might have a highly successful interaction with Manus AI, completing a complex task with high efficiency. Now, you can encapsulate this successful process into a personal Skill with a single click. This is equivalent to capturing and solidifying your know-how and best practices for a specific task. When you need to handle the same task in the future, you can simply invoke your Skill to reliably replicate the successful workflow, eliminating the need for repetitive thinking and trial-and-error, thus significantly improving your personal productivity.
2. Lower the Barrier to Entry and Reuse Team Expertise
For a team, one of the most valuable assets is the experience and knowledge of its members. With our upcoming "Team Skill Library," team members can share their validated, efficient personal Skills. This means that new or less experienced team members can "stand on the shoulders of giants," using Skills created by expert members to complete tasks. This dramatically lowers the barrier to entry and promotes the accumulation and flow of knowledge throughout the team.
Core Design: The Power of Progressive Disclosure
The most revolutionary design of Agent Skills is its "Progressive Disclosure" mechanism. This principle ensures that the AI agent can make the most efficient use of its valuable context window when processing tasks. The content of a Skill is divided into three levels, which are loaded into the context only when needed, thereby minimizing resource waste.
Level | Content | Load Time | Context Cost |
Level 1: Metadata | name and description | Loaded at startup | Extremely low (~100 tokens/Skill) |
Level 2: Instructions | Main content of the SKILL.md file | Loaded when the Skill is triggered | Moderate (<5k tokens) |
Level 3: Resources | Scripts, reference files, assets | Loaded on demand | Consumed only when referenced |
Manus AI and Agent Skills: A Perfect Match
The core architecture of Manus AI aligns perfectly with the design philosophy of Agent Skills, laying a solid foundation for seamless integration.
•Native Architectural Compatibility: Manus AI runs in a fully isolated sandbox virtual machine environment with complete Ubuntu file system access and shell execution capabilities. This is the ideal environment required by Agent Skills. We can easily read the Skill directory, parse the SKILL.md file, and execute the Python or Bash scripts it contains.
•Perfectly Complementary Capabilities: The powerful multi-tool collaboration capabilities of Manus AI (browser, code execution, file operations) combined with the specialized knowledge of Skills will create a huge synergistic effect. For example, a "Market Research" Skill can guide Manus AI to use the browser tool to visit specific websites, use a data analysis script to process downloaded data, and finally generate a complete market analysis report based on a preset template.
•Commitment to Open Standards: We believe the future of AI is open and collaborative. As an open standard, Agent Skills allow multiple AI products and services to share a unified format for capability extension. By integrating Skills, Manus AI not only enhances its own functionality but also contributes to building a more interconnected AI ecosystem.
The Relationship Between Skills and MCP: Complementary, Not a Replacement
In the Manus AI ecosystem, Skills and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) are two technologies with different goals but complementary capabilities.
•The core goal of MCP is to solve the problem of data silos by enabling AI to securely and reliably access external data sources (such as Gmail and Notion) through a standardized protocol. It focuses on the data connection layer.
•The core goal of a Skill is to encapsulate and reuse workflows. Although not designed to connect to external services, a Skill can indirectly call any third-party API by including code scripts (such as Python scripts). In some scenarios, this direct execution of scripts may even be more efficient in terms of context consumption and data access than going through an MCP service.
In summary, MCP provides Manus AI with standardized "data pipelines," while Skills provide the "operating manuals" for executing those pipelines. Together, they form the powerful and extensible ecosystem of Manus AI.
Specific Use Case: Unlocking Data Sources with Skills
Mans AI has many powerful built-in data sources, such as SimilarWeb, YahooFinance, and LinkedinSearch. In the past, they were more like internal, unpublished APIs. By encapsulating each data source as a Skill, we are transforming these opaque tools into discoverable and understandable components for users. Users can browse these data sources in their skill library, understand their functionality and parameters by reading the SKILL.md file, and call them in a stable and reliable manner. This change greatly improves the usability and discoverability of the platform's features.
Arm Your Workflow with Manus Skills
Our integration goes beyond simply adopting the standard. We are introducing new features that make Skills an indispensable part of the Manus AI experience.
Build a Skill with Manus
We are excited to introduce the "Build a Skill with Manus" feature. When you complete a task with Manus AI and are very satisfied with the result and process, you can now instruct Manus to "package this workflow into a Skill." Manus will analyze the successful interaction flow, automatically generate the necessary SKILL.md file, and bundle any relevant scripts. This captures your effective process into a reusable Skill that you can use repeatedly or share with others.
Precise and Reliable Triggering Mechanism
To ensure that the specific Skill you need is activated precisely when you need it, you can now use slash commands in the chat box. By typing /SKILL_NAME, you can explicitly instruct Manus to load the corresponding Skill. This action guarantees that Manus will read the SKILL.md file and trigger its instructions, giving you precise control over the agent's behavior.
Our Skill Integration Roadmap
To ensure a smooth and powerful integration of Agent Skills, we have developed a clear roadmap:
1.Project and Connector Integration: Soon, you will be able to integrate Skills directly into your Manus projects. Combined with Connectors, this will allow you to deeply customize your standard operating procedures (SOPs) for daily work, creating highly automated and intelligent workflows.
2.Team Skill Library: For our team plan users, we will introduce a Team Skill Library. Members can publish their battle-tested personal Skills to this shared library, enabling seamless sharing of expertise and process experience across the entire organization and fostering a culture of collaborative improvement and knowledge retention.
The Future is Composable and Open
We are at an exciting technological inflection point. The future of AI agents will be composable, extensible, and open. Open standards like Agent Skills and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) are paving the way for a network of intelligent, interconnected AI tools.
Mans AI is proud to be an active participant in this movement. By embracing open standards, we believe we can not only provide our users with a more powerful product but also work with the entire community to shape a more collaborative and innovative AI future.
We invite you to join us on this journey.