{"id":775402,"date":"2026-09-19T04:04:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-19T04:04:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/775402\/"},"modified":"2026-09-19T04:04:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-19T04:04:11","slug":"anthropic-decides-to-support-openais-markdown-instructions-spec","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/775402\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropic decides to support OpenAI&#8217;s markdown instructions spec"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>                    <a data-tag=\"ai and ml\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theregister.com\/tag\/ai%20and%20ml\" class=\"lab-article-section-link\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><\/p>\n<p style=\"\" class=\" lab-article-section lab-article-section-top \">\n                    ai and ml\n                <\/p>\n<p>                    <\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"subtitle below\" style=\"\">\n        Devs cheer relief from compatibility headache\n    <\/p>\n<p>Anthropic on Friday surprised the developer community by supporting rival OpenAI&#8217;s mechanism for passing marching orders to AI agents. This makes life easier for folks who use both platforms.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We&#8217;re adding support for AGENTS.md to Claude Code,&#8221; said Claude Code engineer Thariq Shihipar in a social media <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/trq212\/status\/2101009392611278961?s=20\" rel=\"nofollow\">post<\/a>. &#8220;Starting today in version 2.1.277, if there is no CLAUDE.md in a folder, Claude will check for and use AGENTS.md.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Claude Code users can toggle this behavior, he said, with the \/config command.<\/p>\n<p>Until now, developers who use Claude Code alongside OpenAI Codex or other non-Anthropic tools have had to maintain two sets of Markdown instructions for their AI agents: CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md, not to mention project-specific versions of these files.<\/p>\n<p>These documents get read by coding agents with every request. They outline expected behavior, preferred tool usage, coding conventions, and so on. They lay the foundation of the agent&#8217;s context.<\/p>\n<p>The two formats are similar but not identical \u2013 CLAUDE.md may contain Claude-specific instructions while AGENTS.md is intended to be tool agnostic.<\/p>\n<p>Because these documents can change, those working with AI agents have implemented various workarounds, like creating symlinks to keep CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md in sync.<\/p>\n<p>Last year, OpenAI contributed AGENTS.md <a href=\"https:\/\/openai.com\/index\/agentic-ai-foundation\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">to the Agentic AI Foundation<\/a>, under the Linux Foundation, in a bid to build support for its standard. As of December 2025, more than 60,000 open source projects implemented AGENTS.md.<\/p>\n<p>The popularity of Claude Code has given Anthropic the latitude to insist on its own standards, but it appears the company has decided there&#8217;s nothing to be gained from continued specification separatism.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>For those who use AI coding tools, this detente is an event of modest significance. Many widely followed software developers applauded the decision in social media posts.<\/p>\n<p>Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI&#8217;s head of core product, remarked, &#8220;Yay! This is the way. Come to the light,&#8221; to which Shihipar responded with the handshake emoji (\ud83e\udd1d). It&#8217;s enough to bring a tear to the eye. \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ai and ml Devs cheer relief from compatibility headache Anthropic on Friday surprised the developer community by supporting&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":775403,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-775402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=775402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/775403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=775402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=775402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=775402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}