Agent Plugins 1.0.0 published as a vendor-neutral format that bundles MCP server configurations with agent skills

Agent Plugins 1.0.0 was published on 2026-08-06 as a vendor-neutral specification for packaging agent skills and MCP servers into portable plugins. A plugin is a directory with a plugin.json manifest at its root and fixed locations for portable components. MCP servers are declared separately, in an mcp.json file at the plugin root, read by clients that support MCP servers.

The format matters to MCP because it standardizes how a server configuration travels between hosts. Google's announcement states that mcp.json carries explicit transport type specifications, so a client "never has to guess a transport from the shape of a config object, it will work on stdio, Streamable HTTP, or legacy HTTP+SSE." The specification repository ships a schema for that file at schemas/1.0.0/mcp.schema.json.

Governance is deliberately separate from MCP's. The technical steering committee draws representatives from Amazon, Cursor, Microsoft, OpenAI and Vercel, and Google announced on the same day that it is joining as a core maintainer, with support in its Agents CLI and Data Agent Kit. AWS support lands in Kiro Powers and the AWS Agent Toolkit. Vercel names ChatGPT and Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Kiro and VS Code as supporting clients.

The Agentic AI Foundation, which hosts MCP, addressed the relationship directly. A post by Harald Kirschner, a core maintainer of Agent Plugins, states that "Agent Plugins is an independently governed open specification. It is not an AAIF project and has not submitted a proposal to become one," and frames the two as complementary: MCP standardizes the runtime connection, Agent Plugins standardizes the package boundary for distribution.

One inconsistency is worth recording. The specification site states version 1.0.0, but the specification repository has no published release tags and its README still describes the document as a working draft.