What changed
Databricks added beta Unity Catalog Skills as permissioned, tagged and audited SKILL.md resources that coding agents can download or load over MCP. Unity Gateway also began tracking and capping spend for external providers such as Amazon Bedrock and Azure AI Foundry.
Why it matters
Reusable instructions and third-party model traffic become shared supply-chain and budget objects. Central discovery, update rights, audit and spend ceilings can reduce drift, but only if runtime clients actually enforce the catalog and gateway path.
What to do
Publish one non-sensitive skill to a sandbox catalog, restrict discover and update rights, pin its content hash, load it through the intended client and test revocation. Route one external-provider canary through a small spend cap and reconcile gateway records with the provider invoice.
Caveat
Unity Catalog Skills are beta, and catalog permissions do not prove a skill is safe or free of prompt injection. Spend caps depend on all relevant traffic using the gateway and do not replace provider-side quotas, invoices or incident controls.