Vercel and rivals agree on an open format for AI agent plugins
By Steven Van ·
Agent Plugins 1.0.0, built with AWS, Cursor, GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI, packages Skills and MCP servers once for any supporting client.
Vercel has published Agent Plugins 1.0.0, an open, vendor-neutral format for packaging AI agent extensions. A plugin is a directory with a minimal plugin.json manifest plus fixed locations for its parts: Agent Skills live under skills/, and MCP server configuration lives in mcp.json. A client can support either component type or both, and each component is validated independently, so one broken piece doesn't disable the rest.
The point is to let extension authors package a Skill or MCP server once instead of adapting it to each client's own metadata and discovery conventions. Clients keep room to innovate through a namespaced extension mechanism for client-specific data that other clients simply ignore.
The specification was developed with representatives from AWS, Anysphere, GitHub, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Vercel, and its Technical Steering Committee includes core maintainers from AWS, Cursor, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Vercel. At launch, Agent Plugins are supported across:
- ChatGPT and Codex
- Cursor
- GitHub Copilot
- Kiro
- VS Code
The specification, its JSON Schemas, and guides for plugin authors and client implementers are available at agent-plugins.org, with governance and contribution handled in the project's public GitHub repository.
