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Anthropic relicenses its Word, PDF, PowerPoint and Excel skills to Apache 2.0
Anthropic moved four Office skills in its public skills repository from a proprietary licence to Apache 2.0.
Image: GitHub
Why it mattersA team can fork these four skills, change them, and put them inside its own product. The proprietary licence blocked all three.
Four skills in the anthropics/skills repository changed licence on 6 November. The skills are docx, pdf, pptx and xlsx. They now carry the Apache 2.0 licence. Before this, each one carried a short Anthropic licence file. That file read "© 2025 Anthropic, PBC. All rights reserved." Its terms said the use of the skill was governed by the user's agreement with Anthropic.
The change landed in pull request 2146. The author was Mahesh Murag of Anthropic. Peter Lai of Anthropic approved it. The merge used a squash commit. The commit message says the four skills now carry Apache 2.0, like most other skills in the repo. It adds that the README was updated to match. The commit touched the LICENSE.txt and SKILL.md files of all four skills, plus the top-level README.md.
What the four skills do
Each skill is a short text file that an agent reads and follows. The docx skill lets an agent create, edit and read Word documents. Its own description says it covers three jobs. It writes new documents with formatting. It edits existing ones through XML. It pulls text from a Word file. The pdf skill covers PDF files. The pptx skill covers PowerPoint. The xlsx skill covers Excel.
The repository is on GitHub at anthropics/skills. Anthropic calls it the "Public repository for Agent Skills". GitHub shows 189,965 stars and 22,380 forks on it.
What the licence change allows
Apache 2.0 lets anyone copy the skill and change it. A product can include the skill inside it. The file must keep its licence notice. The licence allows commercial use. It does not force the product that uses it to become open source. The old Anthropic licence tied the use to a signed Anthropic agreement. The new licence does not.
A team on Claude Code or any other agent that reads these skills can fork the Office set. It can add its own rules to the docx skill. It can publish the fork. It can sell a product that includes it. Under the proprietary licence, each of those steps had unclear terms.
The README still says the four skills are open source along with the rest of the set. One line in the disclaimer says "many skills in this repo are open source (Apache 2.0)". A second line adds that these are also open source under the same licence.
Anthropic has not published a blog post about this change. The pull request and the commit are the full public statement.
Source
- Pull request 2146 on GitHub, Anthropic.
- The commit itself in
anthropics/skills.
This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.
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