Agent Plugins 1.0 goes generally available across every Copilot surface, with Google as a core maintainer

GitHub announced on 12 August 2026 that Agent Plugins 1.0 — the vendor-neutral format published on 6 August that packages agent skills together with MCP servers — is generally available on all Copilot plans, across VS Code, Visual Studio, Copilot CLI, the Copilot app, the Copilot SDK and the Copilot cloud agent. A plugin is a `skills/` directory plus an `mcp.json`, with Copilot-specific pieces namespaced under `com.github.copilot/`. Co-maintainers now include AWS, Anysphere, Microsoft, OpenAI, Vercel and Google, which joined as a core maintainer on 6 August.

What it means Six days from spec publication to GA across every Copilot surface, with the two largest rival vendors co-maintaining, is the point at which packaging skills and MCP servers separately per client stops being worth the effort.