AGENTS.md has emerged as the industry standard for defining agent behaviour, supported by most major tools. By enforcing the proprietary CLAUDE.md, Anthropic creates unnecessary vendor lock-in.

This directly contradicts Anthropic’s stated desire to instigate a "race to the top", where healthy competition delivers the best outcomes for society.

Anthropic successfully championed their own standards, such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent Skills, which the community has widely adopted to ensure interoperability. But while they expect the ecosystem to standardise on their technologies, they refuse to reciprocate by adopting the established community standard, AGENTS.md.