[License-discuss] Licensing AI Agent Skills - A New Frontier?

[Richard Fontana]

On Mon, Apr 6, 2026 at 10:52 AM Moming Duan <duanmoming at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi OSI license community,
>
> Following previous discussions on model licensing and distillation, I wanted to raise another emerging question: how should we think about licensing AI agent "skills"?
>
> Skills are instruction sets for AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.), they're essentially structured prompts with metadata, code snippets, and workflows that tell the AI how to perform specific tasks. They're distributed like software packages but aren't executed code.
>
> A few questions I'm curious about:
>
> 1. Do skills need explicit licenses?

In general I think so.

> Anthropic's official skills use a restrictive proprietary license prohibiting extraction, derivatives, and distribution [1], while community skills like Tavily's often use MIT [2]. But are skills even copyrightable works, or just instructions?

"Instructions" can be copyrightable works. I think at least some
skills files are likely copyrightable.

> 2. Are these licenses enforceable?
>
> The US Copyright Office has concluded that "prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control" to qualify for copyright protection [3]. If the underlying prompts aren't copyrightable, what legal basis do skill licenses actually rest on?

The document does not state that. Rather, it says that prompts alone
do not provide sufficient human control over AI-generated outputs to
confer human authorship and thus copyrightability over the outputs. It
references an earlier document ("Copyright and Artificial Intelligence
- Part 2: Copyrightability"
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf)
that appears to endorse the view (which I think is pretty obvious)
that sufficiently creative prompts may be copyrightable.

> 3. Are traditional OSS licenses appropriate?
>
> Skills aren't software that gets compiled and executed - they're instructions that guide AI behavior. Do concepts like "derivative works" and "distribution" even apply in the same way?

So I was just involved in an email thread about this topic. They may
not apply in the same way as that gets compiled and executed, but it's
already the case that open source software licenses are extensively
used for non-software material in open source project repositories.

My general view is that traditional open source software licenses are
completely appropriate for association with such material if they are
copyrightable (and I'm starting to come around to the view, which I'd
previously been resisting for a complex set of reasons, that they are
appropriate even in situations where copyrightability is relatively
dubious).

Richard

> --- Refs
> [1] Anthropic skill LICENSE example: https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/docx/LICENSE.txt
> [2] Tavily skills (MIT): https://github.com/tavily-ai/skills
> [3] US Copyright Office on prompt copyrightability: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922