Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI, continues to expand its platform’s capabilities. Following recent updates with Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Claude Haiku 4.5, the company on Thursday unveiled a new feature called Skills — designed to help Claude perform specialized tasks more effectively.
In essence, Skills act as customizable folders that store information related to a specific activity or workflow. These folders can contain documents, detailed instructions, or even code snippets that Claude can draw upon while completing a task. Anthropic says the feature is aimed primarily at workplace productivity, allowing users to reuse context and maintain consistency across projects. However, Skills will only be available for Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers — not for free users.
How Claude Skills Work
Each Skill functions like a modular toolkit. When you give Claude a task, it automatically detects which Skills could be useful and applies them to craft its response. In one example, Anthropic demonstrates this with a fictional company called Crabacadabra. A user uploads brand guidelines, internal documents, and a promotional script to create a Crabacadabra Skill. Later, when the user asks Claude to prepare a pitch deck, the AI references the company Skill to keep the slides on brand and formatted to specifications. It also uses dedicated Skills for PowerPoint and poster design to generate high-quality outputs.
Creating Your Own Claude Skills
Anthropic emphasizes that custom Skills can be a game changer for power users and teams. Once a Skill is created, it becomes accessible everywhere Claude is available — the main chat interface, Claude Code, and the API. Claude can also leverage built-in Skills made by Anthropic for common tasks such as document generation or data formatting.
Users can upload their own materials to develop personalized workflows. In a demo video, Anthropic shows Claude assisting a user in building an image editing Skill. Claude consults other Skills to suggest potential features, such as rotation or centered cropping, then compiles them into a ready-to-use Skill package that the user uploads directly to Claude.
Moving Toward “Agentic” AI Behavior
Skills bring Claude one step closer to agentic behavior — the ability to operate semi-autonomously across repetitive or specialized tasks while adhering to user-set standards. Instead of re-uploading files or retyping long instructions, users can rely on Skills to maintain consistency and accuracy across complex workflows.
Skills can be activated in the Settings menu for Claude Pro and Max users, while Team and Enterprise users will gain access once their administrators enable the feature. Alongside this rollout, Anthropic also announced two enterprise integrations: a Microsoft 365 MCP connector for seamless document interaction and a new enterprise search capability that allows Claude to retrieve organization-specific data as needed. Combined with its ability to generate Excel, Word, and PDF files, Claude continues to evolve into a comprehensive enterprise AI assistant.
