Paying Anthropic customers can now teach their Claude new tricks, which the company calls Skills.

Despite much talk about superintelligence, AI models can be clueless when it comes to interacting with specific applications. Sure, they can parse PDF text, but they probably don't know how to fill in a PDF form.

Skills, or Agent Skills for jargon maximalists, offer a way to instill Claude with specific knowledge that it may not possess in its distillation of training data. Anthropic has already deployed a few of them within Claude to handle common tasks like creating spreadsheets or presentations.

Now, paying Claude customers – not the freeloader tier – can create Skills that suit their specific needs. Just make sure to subtract the labor that went into creating them when tabulating time saved by AI.