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Analysis finds non-English AI agent skills on GitHub rose to 16.3% in second quarter of 2026

An analysis of the GitSkills dataset indicates growing non-English AI agent skill development, led by increases in European and Chinese language files.

Updated Aug 25, 2026 · 02:17 UTC1 reports

The short version

  • The proportion of AI agent skills written in non-English languages increased from 13.0% in Q1 2026 to 16.3% in Q2 2026 across 255,068 tracked files.
  • Growth in non-English skills was driven by European languages and Chinese, whereas Japanese and Korean shares declined or stagnated.
  • English skills are copied and reused more frequently, but non-English skills show higher revision rates within 90 days.

Key facts

  • Anthropic published the SKILL.md specification in October 2025, and nine months later the GitSkills dataset captured 3.8 million skills across 282,200 public repositories.[Hacker News]
  • Across all distinct agent skills in the dataset, English accounts for 85.3%, Chinese for 6.2%, Japanese for 1.7%, German for 1.6%, and Korean for 1.2%.[Hacker News]
  • Between Q1 and Q2 2026, Chinese skills increased from 4.2% to 5.3% and European languages grew from 2.7% to 5.5%, while Japanese fell from 3.2% to 2.5%.[Hacker News]
  • Non-English skills reached a 33.9% revision rate within 90 days compared to 28.7% for English skills, though English skills were copied more widely across repositories.[Hacker News]

What remains uncertain

  • Published estimates of English skill market share vary widely across studies (65.0% to 99.7%) due to differences in sampling sources and crawl methodologies.[Hacker News]
  • Commit timestamp analysis serves as corroborating regional phase evidence rather than precise geographic attribution for individual developers.[Hacker News]

Sources