Anthropic launches 'Skills for Claude' to boost chatbot's productivity, customization
What's the story
Anthropic has unveiled a new feature, Skills for Claude, to enhance its flagship AI chatbot. The innovative tool is designed to make the chatbot more customizable and efficient for individual users and businesses. It comes with folders containing instructions, scripts, and resources that can be loaded by Claude as needed. This way, it can handle specific tasks, such as working with Excel or adhering to brand guidelines, more effectively. The launch comes after a similar tool was introduced by OpenAI.
Customization potential
Users can create their own skills
The Skills feature also gives users the ability to create their own Skills tailored to their specific jobs. These can be used across different platforms like Claude.ai, Claude Code, Anthropic's API, and the Claude Agent SDK. Major companies such as Box, Rakuten, and Canva have already started using this tool.
Enhanced functionality
Skills available for these users
The primary goal of the Skills feature is to enhance Claude's AI agent capabilities for work. This way, users don't have to spend too much time crafting the perfect prompt or referring back to previous context every time they want to accomplish a task. The feature is available for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise users.
Training tool
It's all about agents, says product lead
Brad Abrams, a product lead at Anthropic, told The Verge that the Skills feature is all about agents. He said it essentially gives organizations building agents a way to teach Claude how to do a good job "in their specific context." He stressed that it's not about hitting arbitrary benchmarks but being able to perform the task you need at your own company.
Increased autonomy
Toward more agentic AI
The launch of Skills also marks a step toward making Claude more agentic, or capable of performing complex tasks with minimal user oversight. This is due to its improved ability to understand the context and objectives of individual users. The feature is available for users through Settings > Capabilities. Account admins for Team and Enterprise accounts must first enable organization-wide access before individual employees can use it.