Big Tech agrees on a JSON file, AI agents everywhere breathe sigh of relief

Agent Plugins 1.0.0 is an open, vendor-neutral standard for packaging AI agent Skills and MCP servers into a single distributable plugin directory with a plugin.json manifest. Backed by Vercel, AWS, Microsoft, OpenAI, GitHub, and Cursor, the format lets extension authors package components once and have them discovered automatically by any compatible client. The spec is intentionally minimal—covering only discovery and loading—while leaving installation, policy, and UX to each client. At launch, it's supported by ChatGPT, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code.