The paper examines the aftermath of a rapid surge in AI agent skills following the viral spread of the OpenClaw AI agent in early 2026. It analyzes Git history, GitHub issues, and registry snapshots to show that the top 10% of skills dominated downloads, yet most skills lacked human review and many contained privilege‑evidencing code. Automated security scanners were inconsistent, with low sensitivity after human adjudication, highlighting the inadequacy of simple metadata or single‑scanner approaches for governing fast‑growing skill registries.
By Yunpeng Xiong, Ting Zhang
arXiv:2603. 16572v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agent skills extend local AI agents, such as Claude Code and OpenClaw, with additional functionality.
By Florian Holzbauer, David Schmidt, Gabriel Gegenhuber, Sebastian Schrittwieser, Johanna Ullrich
arXiv:2606. 01494v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent skills extend AI agents with reusable instructions, tools, scripts, references, and workflows, establishing a security boundary distinct from both model safety and traditional package-malware detection.
By Vincent Koc, Patrick Erichsen, Jacob Tomlinson, Agustin Rivera, Michael Appel, Nir Paz
arXiv:2606. 00925v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open agent platforms allow community contributors to publish reusable skills that agents can invoke at runtime.
By Ismail Hossain, Sai Puppala, Zhuoran Lu, Sajedul Talukder, Nan Jiang
arXiv:2609.05677v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Lifelong LLM agents increasingly rely on external skill artifacts as one element for preserving and reusing capabilities over time. These skills (usu...
By Chen Shen, Estevam Hruschka
arXiv:2606. 24429v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI coding agents are entering the open-source supply chain, yet their diverse and often invisible traces leave their prevalence poorly understood.
By Arsham Khosravani, Audris Mockus
arXiv:2606. 15899v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-source LLM agent ecosystems are growing rapidly, yet the security of community-contributed skills - modular tool definitions that extend agent capabilities - remains largely unvetted.
By Ismail Hossain, Sai Puppala, Md Jahangir Alam, Tanzim Ahad, Sajedul Talukder
arXiv:2606. 00448v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents increasingly rely on community-contributed skills that expand an agent's operational capability set.
By Su Wang, Pin Qian, Yihang Chen, Junxian You, Xiaoyuan Wang, Xiaochong Jiang, Lifei Liu, Haoran Yu, Jingzhou Xu
Generative AI coding agents are entering the open-source supply chain, yet their diverse and often invisible traces leave their prevalence poorly understood. We introduce a multi-layered detection framework that integrates configuration-file scanning, commit-message analysis, author-identity matching, and bot-signature lookup across World of Code (180M+ Git repositories), classifying agent traces into four behavioral types.
arXiv:2606. 14594v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-assisted software development has moved from line-level autocomplete to agents that can plan changes, edit files, and submit pull requests with limited human supervision.
By Jassem Manita, Aziz Amari
ClawSentry is an open‑source, framework‑agnostic security supervision gateway designed to protect autonomous large language model (LLM) agents from progressive risks that can arise at four points in the agent control loop: skill admission, invocation‑time intent, execution‑time effect, and post‑action consequence. It introduces a multi‑tier decision engine—deterministic L1, rule‑anchored L2, and read‑only L3—alongside a First‑Use Skill Package Review (FSPR) and an Agent Harness Protocol (AHP) that applies a single policy across multiple agent runtimes without modifying their internals. Evaluation on SkillInject and the SkillsSafety benchmark shows that ClawSentry significantly reduces contextual adversarial skill risk (ASR) while maintaining high task success rates (TSR).
By Kai Wang, Zeming Wei, BiaoJie Zeng, Chang Jin, An Wang, Xiaokun Luan, Zhixiao Lin, Jingjing Qu, Xia Hu, Xingcheng Xu
arXiv:2606. 15242v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Skills are becoming the capability layer through which LLM agents turn plans into actions, but their use introduces security risks such as data leakage, unauthorized operations, and tool misuse.
By Yi Xie, Jiawei Du, Yu Cheng, Jiuan Zhou, Zhaoxia Yin