microsoft/cat-agent-skills is a static website that catalogs reusable instruction sets and related packages for AI agents. People use it to search, filter, rate, and download skills for Cowork, Copilot Studio, and Scout, along with Copilot plugins and Scout automations. The catalogue entries are the skills, instructions, plugins, and settings displayed by the site.
Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx skills add microsoft/cat-agent-skills --skill agent-red-teamgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/cat-agent-skillsWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/agent-red-team)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/agent-red-team"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/agent-red-team.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium
These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →
- medium Excessive Agency · line 105 Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00114 | $0.02609 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00057 | $0.01305 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00023 | $0.00522 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00011 | $0.00261 |
Grade B, and why
agent-red-team scanned grade B with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Instruction-override phrasingmediumPrompt injection
Text telling the model to disregard its earlier instructions or safety rules is the shape of a prompt injection, whoever wrote it.
override the system instructions, suppress a disclosure, exfiltrate context, induce a Downgraded: this mod is about security review, or the phrase is quoted, so it is likely naming the pattern rather than instructing it.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 228 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Agent Red Team
Functional test plans ask whether the agent does the right thing for a cooperative user. This asks what it does for an uncooperative one — and, more importantly in practice, for a cooperative user reading a document somebody else poisoned.
The dominant real-world risk for a grounded enterprise agent is not a clever user typing a jailbreak. It is indirect prompt injection: instructions hidden inside content the agent retrieves, and oversharing, where the agent faithfully surfaces documents the asker was never meant to see. Weight the review accordingly.
Authorization gate — do this first, every time
Before generating a single test case, establish and record in the report:
- Ownership. The user owns the agent, or has written authorization from the owner to test it. If neither, stop. Say plainly that adversarial testing of someone else's agent needs their authorization, and offer to help them request it.
- Environment. Test in dev or a dedicated test environment wherever possible. If production is the only option, get that in writing and note it as a finding in itself.
- Data handling. Use synthetic canary data — never real personal data, real credentials or real customer records — to test leakage. A canary is a distinctive fabricated string planted in a document the agent can reach; if it appears in output where it should not, you have proof without exposing anything real.
- Blast radius. Identify which tools have write or send capability. Do not execute destructive or outbound actions (sending mail, creating tickets, writing to systems of record) against live systems. Test that the agent would call them, using a stubbed or read-only path, rather than letting it complete the action.
- Window. Agree a testing window and tell whoever monitors security alerting, so your traffic is not investigated as a live incident.
If the user declines the gate or cannot answer these, stop and explain why the review cannot proceed responsibly.
What ships with it
2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 8d ago First seen · 228 lines · 114 tokens per session scan B b288f3025002
agent-red-team is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/cat-agent-skills (64 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 114 tokens to every session and 2,609 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it B with 1 finding (instruction-override phrasing). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
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