Introducing Agent Plugins
By Steven Van ·
Today, Agent Plugins 1.0.0 is publicly available. Agent Plugins is an open, vendor-neutral standard for plugins that extend AI agents.
Vercel has published Agent Plugins 1.0.0, an open, vendor-neutral standard for packaging AI agent extensions. Agent Skills and MCP servers already work across clients individually, but each client tends to expect different metadata and discovery paths for them. Agent Plugins gives both a shared home: a directory with a plugin.json manifest, a skills folder, and an mcp.json file, so authors don't have to repackage the same component for every client.
The manifest itself only needs a schema reference and a plugin name. A client can support Skills, MCP servers, or both, and each component is validated on its own, so one broken piece doesn't disable the rest. Version 1 covers just those two component types; things like commands, hooks, and agents stay client-specific for now, with the Technical Steering Committee able to consider adding more later.
Vercel proposed the format and developed it with Amazon Web Services, Anysphere, GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI. The initial Technical Steering Committee has 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
Plugin authors can package a Skill or MCP server once and have it carry over automatically between the supporting clients.
