Non-English agent skills are surging: 16.3% of new skills in Q2 2026, up from 13.0%

What languages are agent skills written in?

An analysis of 1.87 million distinct agent skills (SKILL.md files) on GitHub shows that 14.3% are not written in English, led by Chinese at 6.2%. More striking, the non-English share of newly created skills jumped from 13.0% in Q1 2026 to 16.3% in Q2, driven by a doubling of European languages and steady growth in Chinese. The authors argue this trend signals that AI development is globalizing faster than GitHub's documentation did, and that the non-English share is a floor for the ecosystem's non-US presence, since many large developer populations (India, Nigeria) write in English. They also find that non-English skills are less likely to be copied, and commit timestamps corroborate the geographic spread.