On the 1st anniversary of the launch of the GPT-5 series (launched on August 7, 2025), OpenAI today (August 7) announced the launch of Agent Plugins, a plugin packaging standard for AI agents.
OpenAI stated in its official announcement that Agent Plugins is an open, vendor-neutral standard for packaging reusable components as portable plugins, thereby extending the capabilities of AI agents.
The official 1.0.0 specification is now available. It defines shared formats covering Agent Skills and MCP Servers, among others, allowing compatible clients to discover and load these components according to the same rules.
OpenAI said that different AI agent clients have currently developed their own plugin formats. Even when plugins contain the same underlying components, authors often need to rearrange or duplicate components for different clients. As a result, a plugin packaged for one client may need to be adapted before it can be used by another.
Agent Plugins seeks to establish a small interoperability foundation for components that can be ported across clients. Shared components can use a predictable directory structure, while distribution, installation, permissions, user experience, and client-specific capabilities remain under the control of individual clients.
According to the specification, an Agent Plugin directory must contain a manifest file:
my-plugin/├── plugin.json├── skills/│ └── summarize/│ ├── SKILL.md│ ├── scripts/│ └── references/├── mcp.json└── com.example.client/ └── hooks/IT Home cited the blog post as describing the relevant files as follows:
The plugin.json file identifies the plugin and its target Agent Plugin version.
skills/ contains Agent Skills, whose format is defined by the Agent Skills specification.
mcp.json describes stdio, Streamable HTTP, or legacy HTTP+SSE MCP servers.