---
title: "Agent Plugins package your skills, tools, and more"
description: "Agent Plugins 1.0.0 is an open, vendor-neutral specification for packaging Agent Skills and MCP servers into portable plugins, addressing incompatible wrappers that force authors to maintain client-specific copies. It defines a plugin as a directory with plugin.json, skills/ subdirectories, mcp.json, and client-owned reverse-domain extension namespaces. The manifest fixes component locations, requires explicit MCP server types for stdio, Streamable HTTP, or legacy HTTP+SSE, and lets skills continue loading when an MCP entry fails. Version 1 deliberately excludes installation, distribution, permissions, sandboxing, trust verification, and user experience, leaving those concerns to clients and related ecosystem layers such as discovery and catalogs. Google is joining the Core Maintainers and says Agents CLI and Data Agent Kit support the format, while more product integrations are expected."
---

# Agent Plugins package your skills, tools, and more

[Google](https://yomu.fyi/company/google) · Kevin Hou, Haoyu Wang, Alan Blount · Aug 6, 2026

**Type:** Announcement

## Summary

Agent Plugins 1.0.0 is an open, vendor-neutral specification for packaging Agent Skills and MCP servers into portable plugins, addressing incompatible wrappers that force authors to maintain client-specific copies. It defines a plugin as a directory with plugin.json, skills/ subdirectories, mcp.json, and client-owned reverse-domain extension namespaces. The manifest fixes component locations, requires explicit MCP server types for stdio, Streamable HTTP, or legacy HTTP+SSE, and lets skills continue loading when an MCP entry fails. Version 1 deliberately excludes installation, distribution, permissions, sandboxing, trust verification, and user experience, leaving those concerns to clients and related ecosystem layers such as discovery and catalogs. Google is joining the Core Maintainers and says Agents CLI and Data Agent Kit support the format, while more product integrations are expected.

## Context

Plugin authors combining an Agent Skill with an MCP server had to package them differently for each client because directory layouts, manifest metadata, and MCP configuration shapes varied. The resulting client-specific copies created unnecessary maintenance and drift.

## Approach / What changed

Agent Plugins standardizes a directory package with fixed locations for plugin.json, skills/, and mcp.json, explicit MCP transport types, and reverse-domain namespaces for client-specific extensions. It keeps installation, distribution, permissions, sandboxing, trust verification, and user experience outside the version 1 package format.

## Takeaways

- A valid plugin uses plugin.json, skills/ with one subdirectory per skill, and mcp.json; the manifest cannot relocate or inline components.
- MCP entries must declare their type, covering stdio, Streamable HTTP, and legacy HTTP+SSE, while a failed server entry does not prevent the client from loading the plugin's skills.
- Agent Plugins v1 defines packaging only; discovery, catalogs, installation, policy, permissions, sandboxing, trust, and approval UX remain separate concerns.

**Tags:** [AI Agents](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ai-agents), [MCP](https://yomu.fyi/topic/mcp), [Open Source](https://yomu.fyi/topic/open-source)

- Source: [Google](https://developers.googleblog.com/agent-plugins-package-your-skills-tools-and-more)
- Source URL: https://developers.googleblog.com/agent-plugins-package-your-skills-tools-and-more
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-09-09T14:27:55.859Z

[Read original post](https://developers.googleblog.com/agent-plugins-package-your-skills-tools-and-more)