QuoxSkills
Share your agent skills. Keep the rights.
QuoxSkills is the rights-aware layer for AI agent skills, built on SkillRights, the open licence standard that separates permission to execute a skill from the right to train on it or redistribute it. The standard is live today. Rights-aware distribution through Quox is in development.
$ skillrights init --license notrain --author "Acme Data" wrote LICENSES/LicenseRef-SkillRights-NoTrain-1.0.txt updated SKILL.md license: LicenseRef-SkillRights-NoTrain-1.0 $ skillrights check PASS declaration OK: LicenseRef-SkillRights-NoTrain-1.0 $ skillrights explain LicenseRef-SkillRights-NoTrain-1.0 Execute: yes, by a human or an AI agent acting for one Train: no, training rights are expressly reserved Redistribute: yes, with attribution retained A declaration is a dated statement of terms and non-consent.
The problem
Expertise shared to help is being read as a corpus.
A skill is executable expertise: the procedures, judgement and hard-won lessons of your work, written so an agent can act on them. Publish one so agents can use it and, by default, nothing says whether you also meant it to become training data. Use and training are different grants, and today they are collapsed into one silent yes.
The worry stopped being abstract when an Anthropic researcher's public resignation crystallised it: expertise shared in good faith becomes training data by default. The argument, and what we are doing about it, is in the launch essay: your expertise is not training data.
The open standard
Attach your terms in one line.
SkillRights is an open licence family for agent skills, vendor-neutral on its own domain. A declaration is one line in a skill's existing licence field, using an SPDX LicenseRef identifier, and a free generator produces the supporting files. The full text lives in the spec, not here.
Open
Execute, train and redistribute, all permitted. For tutorial and community expertise meant to be learned from freely.
NoTrain
Agents may execute and people may share it on. Model-training rights are reserved. The default for professional expertise published for use.
Reserved
Execution by authorised users only; training and redistribution reserved. For private, internal or commercially licensed skills.
What a declaration is, precisely. A dated statement of terms and non-consent. In the EU it supports a text-and-data-mining rights reservation. It is not a technical shield against scraping. The 1.0 texts were produced through adversarial multi-model AI review; they are not advice from qualified counsel.
SkillRightsThe open standard, at skillrights.orgWhat QuoxSkills adds in development
Distribute skills on your terms.
SkillRights says what your terms are. QuoxSkills is the Quox layer that acts on them: distribution that reads the declaration before a skill is synced, listed or shared. It is built and in testing, and it is not yet deployed, so everything in this section is labelled for what it is.
Rights-aware distribution
Skills travel with their declarations, and the platform checks the licence before it moves one. An Open skill flows freely, a NoTrain skill carries its reservation with it, a Reserved skill goes only where its author authorised.
Sovereign Skill
A Reserved-licensed skill that stays yours: executable by the agents you authorise and nobody else's, distributed through governed channels, with a signed record of who received it.
The live foundation
Shared skills and rules sync already runs on Quox dev servers: one signed manifest, every machine, drift detected and healed. The rights layer lands on top of that path, not beside it.
Where it stands
What is live, what is coming.
The standard is real and usable today. The Quox layer on top is not shipped yet, and this page does not pretend otherwise.
- The SkillRights standard and its spec, published at skillrights.org.
- The three 1.0 licences: Open, NoTrain and Reserved, each a one-line SPDX LicenseRef declaration.
- The free generator for robots.txt additions and a TDM reservation file.
- The declaration registry. An entry shows a signed declaration existed by a time, from a given key, in a given order. It does not prove ownership of the expertise.
- External anchoring of the registry: every tree head is countersigned by an RFC 3161 timestamp authority and submitted to public OpenTimestamps calendars, so the log is never its own only witness.
- The launch essay, and shared skills and rules sync on Quox dev servers.
- Rights-aware distribution through QuoxSkills: skills travelling with their declarations, the licence read before a skill is synced or shared. Built and in testing, not yet deployed.
- The Sovereign Skill tier: a Reserved-licensed skill your agents can execute and nobody else can, distributed only through channels you authorise, with a signed record of who received it. In development.
Start now
Declare your terms today.
The standard costs nothing and takes about a minute per skill. Read it at skillrights.org, read the essay for the argument, and see the developer surface for what Quox already ships.
license: LicenseRef-SkillRights-NoTrain-1.0skillrights.org →