APM (AI)

Canonical version: APM (AI).

APM (Agent Package Manager) is Microsoft's open-source dependency manager for AI agent configurations. You declare your agentic dependencies (skills, prompts, plugins, MCP servers, agent primitives) in a single apm.yml manifest, and apm install reproduces the exact same agent setup on any machine, for any teammate.

Key features:

• Transitive dependency resolution — packages can depend on other packages, like any real package manager.
• Security scanning — blocks known-compromised packages, detects hidden Unicode (the prompt injection vector for instruction files), and pins integrity hashes in lockfiles.
• Policy governance — organizations restrict allowed sources and primitives via apm-policy.yml.
• Multi-platform — targets GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, Grok Build, Gemini, and others, built on the open standards those tools converged on: AGENTS.md, Agent Skills, and Model Context Protocol (MCP).

MIT licensed, actively maintained, and clearly production-minded.

APM is a bet that this whole layer becomes a managed artifact with versioning, lockfiles, and supply-chain checks instead of copied folders. Once Claude Code Skills and Claude Code Plugins are installable dependencies, they inherit every supply-chain problem npm has, plus prompt injection. A package manager that treats instruction files as attack surface from day one is the right starting point.

References

• GitHub: https://github.com/microsoft/apm

Related

• Claude Code Skills
• Claude Code Plugins
• Model Context Protocol (MCP)
• Claude Code
• Multi-Agent Portability

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