Cursor now supports Agent Plugins, an open standard for bundling skills and MCP

Cursor, the AI code editor, said on August 6 that it supports Agent Plugins, a new open format for packaging two kinds of agent add-ons: skills, which are reusable instructions and resources, and MCP servers, which connect an agent to outside tools and services. According to Cursor's plugin documentation, a plugin that follows the Agent Plugins specification loads in Cursor, so an author does not have to repackage it in Cursor's own format.

Cursor keeps its own format alongside the standard. Its documentation says Agent Plugins carry only skills and MCP servers, while Cursor Plugins can also include rules, custom agents, commands and hooks. A plugin that depends on those extras stays Cursor-specific. That matches the standard's design: Vercel, which initiated the proposal, describes it as deliberately small, leaving installation, distribution, policy and client-specific features to each app.

Support is not identical even for the shared parts. Cursor's documentation says it does not expand the standard's PLUGIN_ROOT and PLUGIN_DATA path variables in a plugin's MCP configuration and asks authors to use its own CURSOR_PLUGIN_ROOT instead, so an MCP server that relies on those standard paths may need adjusting before it works in Cursor. The documentation describes Cursor's current behavior, which may differ from what shipped on announcement day.