# 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]]