Google retires Gems on November 17. The format that replaces them was written by Anthropic.

Google put that line near the bottom of its announcement on September 30, 2026, the one that retires Gems 1. A company describing its new product as one that will eventually match the old one is a particular kind of promise, and it is the honest half of this launch.

Gems have been in the Gemini app since 2024, when Google introduced them as "custom versions of Gemini" 2. They now have an end date. The format replacing them did not originate at Google, and if you have Gems saved, what decides your next move is what survives the transfer and what the transfer asks of you.

Google's help page defines skills as reusable custom instructions 3. You type a forward slash in the Gemini prompt bar, type the skill's name, and it runs. The page notes the trigger is "soon to be @" 3. Skills are rolling out in Gemini chat worldwide now, after debuting inside the Gemini Spark agent 14.

Two behaviours matter more than the definition. Gemini applies a skill on its own when it decides your current prompt matches one 3. And you can stack several in a single chat, so a writing-style skill and a brand-guidelines skill can run together 1.

You can attach context to a skill as plain text documents, PDFs and images, a capability Google switched on the same day 1. There is a ceiling of 100 skills active at once; past it you disable one to enable another 3.

Read the same facts as a buyer would, and the promise and the mechanics separate quickly.

At the file level, a skill is a folder whose one required piece is a file called SKILL.md. That file opens with metadata for a name and a description, and it can bundle scripts, reference documents and templates alongside them 5. An agent reads the name and description first and pulls in the rest only when a task matches, which is what lets an agent keep many skills on hand without loading them 5.

The format is Anthropic's. Anthropic introduced Agent Skills on October 16, 2025, and published it as an open standard on December 18, 2025 6. The standard's own site describes Agent Skills as "originally developed by Anthropic" and adopted across a growing list of agent products 5. The Decoder, covering the launch, frames Google as joining OpenAI and Anthropic in a move toward agent-ready prompt formats, and notes that OpenAI is retiring Custom GPTs at the same time 7.

Google's announcement does not mention where the format came from. Its help page is more specific than its marketing, because the help page has to tell you what to do with the file. To attach files to a skill, Google instructs you to download the skill as a .zip, take out the SKILL.md it contains, drop that file into a folder named after your skill, and upload the folder. The same page says you can import skills made on other platforms by uploading their SKILL.md files 3.

The Gem manager started telling users in late September: "Gems will become skills starting Nov 17, 2026," with the note that "we'll automatically begin migrating your Gems to skills" and that you keep using your Gems until they migrate 2. Support is then removed on three clocks: November 2026 for personal Google accounts, March 2027 for Workspace business, enterprise and nonprofit customers, and June 2027 for Workspace education 3.

If you would rather not wait for Google's pass, the manual route is three steps and it reads like a records request. Open the Gem and download every file under its Knowledge section, one at a time. Create a folder for the skill whose name is "all lowercase with hyphens separating words" 3. Create the skill and paste in the name, description and instructions. Then, to reattach the files, download the skill as a .zip, move the SKILL.md file out of the zip into your folder, and upload the folder back as a replacement 3.

Two limits sit inside that sequence. The automatic pass moves "supported files" with your Gems; by hand you move knowledge files one at a time 3. GitHub files are not supported in skills, so a Gem built to read them has to be rebuilt around something else 3.

Google's help page answers "Will skills have the same features as Gems?" with yes, then pushes the specifics into the future. Sharing skills by link, adding files from Google Drive, and using notebooks from Gemini Notebook are all scheduled for the coming weeks 13. File upload for creating a skill works only in the Gemini app on Mac and in the web app 3.

A second answer is sharper. Under whether skills work with other Gemini features, the help page says: "For now, most default tools that are available in Gems do not work with skills." The list that follows is Create video, Create music, Canvas, Deep research and Guided learning 3. Those are five Gemini features a Gem could call in 2024 that a skill cannot call today. Gems also let you set a default tool and hand someone a share link, and 9to5Google reported both as Gems-only advantages when the change first surfaced 2.

The history view changes too. Skills have no page listing the chats where a particular skill was used, which Gems had. Google's explanation is that skills can run in any chat, so those conversations sit in the side panel like any other 3.

Not every Gem becomes a skill. Google's announcement carries a footnote: Gems by Google Labs will turn down along with the rest, and those "will not migrate into skills" 1. Opal, the experiment for building mini apps, shuts down in the same month 18.

Skills are open to people over 18 signed in to a personal Google Account, with work and school accounts to follow 3. Google's footnote says they are available on all Google AI subscription tiers 1, and 9to5Google reports the rollout reaches free users who do not have Spark 4.

The switch adds no line item. Gemini is free with a Google Account, and the paid tiers run $4.99, $19.99 and from $99.99 a month 9. Skills ride whatever plan you already hold. The cost here is the afternoon you spend rebuilding.

The plan page has one detail worth a second look. Gems are still listed among the features of the free tier, in the present tense, on the plan page as it stands today 9.

Skills are the better mechanism, and that part is real. Invoking a saved prompt inside the conversation you are already in beats opening a Gem manager, and a folder with a SKILL.md in it is a format other agents already read, which means the work you do now travels further than Gemini 5. Google did not pick the worse design.

What it shipped is a handover, and the handover is where the cost sits. The replacement arrives without five of the tools the thing it replaces could call, without sharing and Drive files for a few more weeks, with a 100-skill ceiling, and with a manual path whose third step is moving a file named after a competitor's standard. None of that is a scandal. It is the ordinary gap between an announcement and a migration, and the announcement chose the date.

So the fit is specific. If you keep one or two Gems with nothing attached, wait for November 17 and let Google do it. If your Gems carry knowledge files, open them this week, download the files while the old interface still exists, and write down what each Gem was for. If any of them are Gems by Google Labs, start over now, because Google has already said those do not come along. On Workspace, March 2027 sounds distant and is not.

The test that settles it takes an hour. Pick the Gem you depend on most, download one knowledge file from it, and rebuild it as a skill by hand today. Whatever breaks in that hour is what the automatic pass will break for everyone else in November, at a scale where nobody will be able to fix it by hand.