What are Claude Skills?
Skills are folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude loads dynamically to improve performance on specialized tasks.
What are Skills?
Skills are folders containing instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude dynamically loads to enhance its performance on professional tasks. Skills teach Claude to perform specific tasks in a repeatable way—whether creating documents with company branding, analyzing data with your organization's workflow, or automating a personalized task.
Skills are available as a feature preview for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise users. This preview requires code execution to be enabled. They are also available in beta for Claude Code users and all API code execution users.
How do Skills work?
Skills dramatically improve consistency, speed, and accuracy for a wide range of tasks. Skills use a “progressive disclosure” workflow: Claude selects relevant skills, dynamically loads their instructions only when useful, and avoids overflowing the context window.
When you ask Claude to perform a task, it reviews available skills, loads those that are relevant, and follows their instructions.
Types of Skills
Anthropic Skills
Anthropic-built skills maintained by the Claude team—such as Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and PDF enhancements—are available to all users. Claude will automatically use these skills when appropriate.
Custom Skills
Custom skills allow individuals or organizations to extend Claude with tailored workflows and domain expertise. Examples:
- Apply brand style guides to documents and presentations
- Generate communications using your company’s email templates
- Format meeting notes according to organizational standards
- Create tickets in JIRA/Asana/Linear following company conventions
- Run organization-specific data analysis pipelines
- Automate personal workflows for a fully customized Claude
Key Benefits
-
Enhanced professional task performance
Skills supplement Claude’s general intelligence with specialized document creation, data analysis, and domain-specific capabilities. -
Institutional knowledge
Companies can encode procedures, best practices, and internal knowledge as skills for consistent collaboration. -
Easy customization
Most skills can be created with Markdown instructions—no code required. For advanced needs, scripts can be included for execution.
Comparing Skills to other Claude capabilities
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Skills vs. Projects | Projects are “static background knowledge” loaded for every project chat; skills are on-demand programs globally available in Claude. |
| Skills vs. MCP (Model Context Protocol) | MCP lets Claude access external services and data; skills provide procedures and workflows. Used together, MCP connects tools and skills teach Claude how to use them. |
| Skills vs. Custom Instructions | Custom instructions apply globally; skills are invoked only for relevant tasks and domain workflows. |
Learn more about Skills
- For a deeper dive into how Skills work, see Agent Skills
- Related help articles:
More Articles
Using Skills in Claude
Skills extend Claude's capabilities by giving it access to specialized knowledge and workflows.
How to Create Custom Claude Skills
Skills extend Claude's capabilities by giving it access to specialized knowledge and workflows.
Introducing Claude Skills
Claude Skills: Customize AI for your workflows.
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