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 provenance-checkgit 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/provenance-check)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/provenance-check"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/provenance-check/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/provenance-check"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/provenance-check.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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 | $0.00057 | $0.00323 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00023 | $0.00129 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00011 | $0.00065 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00006 | $0.00032 |
Grade A, and why
provenance-check scanned grade A with 0 findings 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 today.
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.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
What it actually says
Provenance Check (Govern)
Purpose
The compliance determination IS the work: license scope x geography x expiry gates every citation for the DECLARED use (#4.1/#4.2). A restricted or expired study is unusable however strong the stat.
When to use
After trend-compare, before any brief is drafted.
Inputs
compared.json + config/rights-register.json.
Steps
- Run scripts/provenance_check.py --compared compared.json --rights rights-register.json --out governed.json
- Quote the record verbatim; excluded studies are named with their restriction so the reader knows what was left out and why.
Output
governed.json - the {provenance_record} hop.
Grounding requirements
Every entry cites the rights register row.
Constraints
- The engine decides; the model never launders a restricted stat by paraphrase - a reworded number is still the licensed number.
- Approving new rights is the licensing team's work, not this plugin's.
Escalation / uncertainty
Missing register rows -> unusable until registered; escalate to research ops.
What ships with it
9 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.
- assets/LICENSE.txt 1.0 KB
- config/research-index.json 929 B
- config/rights-register.json 653 B
- contracts/rtl.consumer-insight-synthesis.v1.json 1.2 KB
- insight-rules.md 1.2 KB
- references/insight-rules.md 1.2 KB
- research-index.json 929 B
- rights-register.json 653 B
- scripts/provenance_check.py 2.3 KB runs code
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.
- today First seen · 26 lines · 57 tokens per session scan A 665da98e5f35
provenance-check is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/cat-agent-skills (93 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 57 tokens to every session and 323 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-10-28.
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