Self-improving agents can poison their own skill library, and nobody is checking before it happens

Anthropic and Google both now ship official, growing libraries of reusable agent skills.

The convention is spreading because it works. Package a capability once, load it only when relevant, skip re-explaining the same task every session.

But a library that grows on its own has a weak point.

New research on self-evolving agents shows a defective skill can enter the library, get used as reference material for distilling later skills, and quietly contaminate everything downstream.

Removing the bad skill after the fact barely helps.

The paper's fix is not a smarter model.

It is a gate before a skill ever enters the library: • Verify the skill before it commits • Version it like code • Roll it back like code

Skills are becoming infrastructure that two major vendors now ship by default.

Infrastructure without a review step at the point of entry is not infrastructure. It is technical debt with a head start.

#ai #skills #agentic-ai