Standards

NIST's one substantive agent document of October 2026 was joint-agency incident practices for agent misbehavior, aimed at frontier labs and disclaiming compliance use. The benchmark guidance and the identity practice guide are still drafts, and an executive order renamed the program without changing the definitions inside it.

Agent skills began as a way to give Claude domain expertise and became an open, cross-vendor format for packaging capability: a folder with a SKILL.md file that runs on Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Copilot, and a Java service alike.

Model Context Protocol drops its stateful handshake and becomes a stateless protocol, and its new roadmap elevates agent identity to a top-five priority.