What
Skills (packaged sets of instructions Claude Code can use for a task) that are synced rather than local used to be identified by a GitHub URL. They are now identified by an anthropic-skills:<name> identifier instead, with matching logic to strip that prefix back off when needed.
Why
Synced skills can have bare names that aren't guaranteed to be unique, so they can't be safely checked for naming collisions the way local skills are. Giving them a qualified anthropic-skills: identifier avoids that ambiguity.
Names in the bundleanthropic-skills:
The entry above is what we published on the day. These lines were added later, as Anthropic's own pages caught up, and they sit beside the original rather than replacing it.
Confirmed since
Anthropic's documentation has since written up anthropic-skills:, on Extend Claude with skills.
| Any of the above and a skill [synced from your claude.ai account](#how-synced-skills-behave) | The other skill or command. The synced skill still runs as `/anthropic-skills:<name>`. See [When a synced skill name matches another command](…skills see the edit
Two sources agreeTwo things we can check say the same as this entry.
Anthropic's documentation agrees
Anthropic's documentation has since written up anthropic-skills:, on Extend Claude with skills.
Anthropic's release notes agree
Changed skills synced from claude.ai in cloud sessions to be named anthropic-skills:<name>, matching Claude Desktop; the bare name still…