A Claude associate is evaluating whether to enable a Skill that was provided by an...

A Skill from an unfamiliar party must be treated as untrusted until its origin and behavior are reviewed. Option A verifies provenance and confirms that the Skill is permitted by the organization’s governance process. Option B applies least privilege by examining what the Skill can access or execute and determining whether those capabilities are necessary for its stated task.

Public availability, popularity, or favorable reviews do not establish security. A Skill can contain instructions, scripts, dependencies, external calls, or other resources capable of causing unintended actions or exposing data. Therefore, Options C and D substitute reputation for technical and organizational validation. Option E is also unsafe because Skills may execute code or access resources available in the surrounding environment; assumed workflow boundaries are not a reliable security control.

Anthropic warns that malicious or compromised Skills can create prompt-injection, unauthorized-access, and data-exfiltration risks. Its guidance instructs users to install Skills only from trusted sources and to inspect bundled files, scripts, dependencies, network calls, and requested operations before enabling them. Organizational allowlists and permission reviews provide complementary controls: one establishes trust in the source, while the other limits what the Skill may do. Anthropic’s Skill security guidance

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