On September 25, 2026, Anthropic announced on its official blog that it has opened a brand-new directory submission portal for Claude plugins: plugins are now the primary way for third-party developers to build extensions for Claude, packaging MCP connectors, Agent Skills, or both, submitted through the new portal for review and listed in the Claude directory once approved.
What the portal brings online
The portal is open to developers on paid Claude plans and offers two listing paths. The first is a single MCP connector: developers simply point to their own remote MCP server to submit. The second is a plugin bundle: MCP servers and Skills packaged together, hosted on GitHub and submitted as a repository. In Claude Code, plugins can also include LSPs (language servers), commands, hooks, and agents. Whichever path you take, the portal guides the submission through to launch: each submission is auto-validated and safety-scanned on arrival, review progress, scan results, and recommended changes are visible in the portal, and once approved, developers decide when to publish.
Once live, developers also get usage analytics in the portal: installs broken down by product surface and version, listing views, and the searches that led users to the plugin. That data directly decides what to fix and build next.
How it relates to Skills and connectors
This update also clarifies the hierarchy of Claude's extension system. Skills and MCP connectors remain the building blocks, and the Claude directory will keep listing them; in the future, developers will be able to convert an existing connector listing into a plugin, and already-listed skills, connectors, or plugins need no changes. Anthropic also announced support for the latest MCP spec (commonly called MCP 2.0), including a stateless core, plus two MCP extensions: MCP Apps, which embeds interactive UI inside chat, and Enterprise Managed Auth, zero-touch OAuth for enterprise users. A unified discovery experience will roll out across Claude and Claude Code in the coming weeks.
For developers, the substance of this update is that building and distributing extensions now live in one place: MCP servers, Skills, and plugins were previously scattered across separate entries and review flows, and now a single submission pipeline can carry a plugin into the Claude directory while returning real install and search data to iterate on. For users, a uniformly reviewed directory means third-party extensions get an official safety backstop — Anthropic states that every submission goes through a safety scan. It is also the next step after Anthropic launched the Claude Marketplace on September 23: the Marketplace answers "where do users find extensions," the submission portal answers "how do developers get extensions in," and together they complete the supply chain of Claude's third-party ecosystem.
