Amazon, Cursor, Microsoft, OpenAI and Vercel have published Agent Plugins 1.0.0 — an open, vendor-neutral specification for packaging AI agent skills and MCP servers into portable plugins — and Google is joining the project as a core maintainer, announcing support in its Agents CLI and Data Agent Kit starting today.

The standard attacks a problem every agent developer has felt: skills and MCP servers are portable on their own, but the wrapper around them — the directory layout, the manifest format, the MCP configuration shape — is not, so shipping the same capability to a second client means forking and maintaining two copies that drift apart.

An Agent Plugin is deliberately simple: a directory with a plugin.json manifest, a skills/ folder following the Agent Skills specification, an mcp.json declaring servers with an explicit transport type, and an optional reverse-domain namespace where a single client can keep its own extensions. Components fail independently — a broken MCP server does not take down the plugin's skills — and clients simply ignore what they do not recognize.

The spec deliberately leaves out installation, distribution, permissions, sandboxing and provenance for future consideration, so that each client can handle policy differently. At launch, compatible clients include ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Kiro and VS Code. Google's Data Agent Kit ships plugins connecting agents to BigQuery, Spanner and Cloud SQL, while its Agents CLI packages expert skills for building, evaluating and deploying agents — now distributable in a format that belongs to no single vendor.

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