OpenAI ships Skills Over MCP while the spec (SEP-2640) remains unmerged
tristanbob · x · 2026-11-04
An Arcade blog post analyzes OpenAI shipping the "Skills Over MCP" MCP extension in its plugins on Aug 26 — before the underlying spec, SEP-2640, has been merged. The author thinks it may be a big deal with messy timing.
- Foundations: MCP is the open standard for agent-to-system connections (started by Anthropic, later donated to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation); Tools are verbs, Resources are read-only nouns, Skills are SKILL.md procedure directories.
- The elegant part: Skills Over MCP lets a server distribute its own skills over the same connection that serves its tools, built entirely on Resources — "shipping the instruction manual together with the product."
- Spec status: interest group formed Feb 1, chartered working group Apr 16, dozens of commits on SEP-2640, still unmerged — yet OpenAI shipped ahead of it.
- The author concludes he's "back on team MCP."
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