Google Replaces Gems with 'Skills' in Gemini, Adopting Anthropic's Agent Prompt Format

Google is rolling out "Skills" globally in Gemini chat, retiring Gems, its Custom GPT-style feature, and adopting a prompt format that originated with Anthropic and is also being used by OpenAI.

Skills are detailed, reusable prompts for specific tasks that Gemini can help users write and refine. Users invoke a Skill by typing "/" followed by its name, similar to slash commands in chat apps. Gemini can also generate Skills automatically from past conversations and trigger them on its own when it detects a matching prompt pattern.

According to Google, multiple Skills can be chained together for more complex tasks — for example, combining a writing-style Skill with a brand-guidelines Skill in a single request. Skills now support text documents, PDFs, and images as reference material. Google says it will add sharing, Google Drive file support, and Gemini Notebook integration "in the coming weeks," followed by a rollout to enterprise, education, and nonprofit Workspace customers.

From Gems to an open standard

Gems, Google's answer to OpenAI's Custom GPTs, let users configure a chatbot with fixed instructions and knowledge. Skills represent a narrower, more composable unit — a single task template rather than a standalone persona — that aligns with how Anthropic designed its Skills format for Claude. The format is available as an open standard, meaning other developers and platforms could adopt the same structure.

OpenAI is separately sunsetting Custom GPTs, its own version of the persona-based chatbot builder, pointing to a broader industry shift away from monolithic custom bots toward smaller, chainable prompt units better suited to agentic workflows where an AI system needs to invoke discrete capabilities on demand.

Shutdown timeline

Google has set the following deadlines for Gems:

• November 2026: Gems shut down for personal Google accounts
• March 2027: Gems shut down for enterprise and nonprofit Workspace customers
• June 2027: Gems shut down for education customers

Existing Gems will convert to Skills automatically, so users won't need to manually rebuild their configurations. Separately, Google confirmed that Opal, its AI mini-app experiment launched in summer 2025, will also shut down in November 2026.

What this means

The move signals that the "custom chatbot" paradigm popularized by Custom GPTs in late 2023 is being phased out in favor of smaller, composable prompt units designed for agent chaining. Rather than users building one large persona with fixed instructions, Skills function more like callable modules an AI model can select, combine, and execute autonomously — a structure that matters more as models take on multi-step, tool-using tasks rather than single-turn chat.

Google following Anthropic's Skills format rather than inventing its own suggests early convergence on a shared specification across major labs, which would make it easier for third-party developers to write task templates that work across Gemini, Claude, and potentially ChatGPT. Whether that interoperability materializes in practice — or each company builds a proprietary variant under a shared name — will determine if "Skills" becomes a genuine cross-platform standard or just a naming trend.