Skills no longer have to ride along in a plugin to reach an agent. Gateways and hosted MCP servers can now serve the skills linked to them straight over the MCP Skills extension, so a connected agent lists, verifies, and loads them the same way it discovers tools, and every load is recorded as an activation. This is rolling out behind the skills-over-mcp flag. Link management and usage reporting ship alongside it, so you can see exactly what a given surface serves and when it was last loaded. More on this in Skills.

Features

• Gateways serve the skills linked to them over MCP — A stored gateway or your organization gateway now answers skills/list, skills/get, and skill reads with the skills linked to it, plus every skill linked to the member servers you reach through it. Rolling out behind the skills-over-mcp flag. (#8268, @simplesagar)
• Link skills to a server or gateway directly — New skill-links management lets you choose which skills an MCP server, a gateway, or your organization gateway serves over MCP, independent of plugin distribution. The Platform MCP gains matching link_skill_to_mcp and unlink_skill_from_mcp tools. (#7798, @simplesagar)
• Hosted MCP servers and the Platform MCP serve their own reviewed skills over MCP — Connected agents can list, verify, and load linked skills with skills/list, skills/get, and skill:// reads, and each load is recorded as an activation. Rolling out behind the skills-over-mcp flag. (#7749, @simplesagar)
• Match a loaded skill to the exact version an agent saw — Platform MCP skill version listings now include served_digest, the digest an agent sees when it loads that version over a hosted MCP server, so you can match a load in your logs to the exact version. (#7749, @simplesagar)
• Try linked skills in the dashboard playground — A chat session started from a signed-in dashboard session now sees the same skills the user does, and can list and load them from the playground. (#8269, @simplesagar)
• See when a skill was last loaded over MCP — Skills and skill distributions now report last_loaded_over_mcp_at, so a skill served only over MCP, with no plugin distribution, still shows its usage. (#7677, @simplesagar)
• Skill loads over MCP show up in your tool-usage logs — A skill read over a hosted MCP server now appears in tool-usage logs and the MCP & Tools summary, next to skills reported by hooks. (#7698, @simplesagar)

Bug fixes

• Re-linking a skill is now marked destructive — link_skill_to_mcp can change or clear the version a target serves, so it's now flagged destructive like unlink_skill_from_mcp; a link target also matches its ID regardless of letter case. (#8235, @simplesagar)