
Anthropic’s Claude Skills are task-specific, bundled knowledge + scripts that teach Claude how to perform specialized work; the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open protocol that tells agents what external tools and data sources exist and how to call them. Skills embed procedural/organizational knowledge; MCP provides standardized connectivity. They’re complementary — use MCP to reach data and services, use Skills to interpret, validate, and act on that data in domain-correct ways.

Claude’s new Skills feature—recently rolled out by Anthropic—lets teams and developers teach Claude repeatable, sharable capabilities: think of compact,

Anthropic’s Claude Skills (announced October 16, 2025) mark a practical step toward making AI agents genuinely useful inside organizations — not just clever