Study finds 3,134 agent skills require accounts or API keys

On November 2, 2026, the DEV Community AI section published a piece titled "Inspecting agent skill dependencies: 3,134 skills require an account or a key", which disclosed statistics from Skillselion. Drawing on Skillselion's own catalog data as of October 30, 2026, the census found that among 16,798 agent skills with a stored prerequisite list, 3,134 of them (18.7%) named an account, a login, or an API key as a requirement. This is the only report on the subject available so far, and apart from the authors' own disclosure, no third party has yet responded to or independently verified the findings.

In the article, the authors caution that an empty dependency list proves nothing about what a skill actually needs to run. They advise readers, before installing any agent skill, to read its SKILL.md frontmatter and body for environment variables, CLIs, and sign-in steps, and then to open every file that it links to.

The authors note that Skillselion runs the directory from which the data was drawn, so the figures come from their own catalog rather than an independent source, and they state that they are not affiliated with any publisher. The disclosure period for this census has therefore passed without any external confirmation, and the topic appears to have drawn no follow-up coverage since the article's publication.