Google spent nearly a year accepting code contributions from hundreds of independent developers on an open-source AI terminal tool — then on May 19, 2026, announced it would withdraw API access from all non-paying users and hand the project's future exclusively to enterprise customers, while replacing it with a closed-source successor that, by Google's own admission, does not yet match it feature for feature.
The tool is Gemini CLI, a TypeScript-based AI coding agent released under the Apache 2.0 license in June 2025. Over the following year it accumulated over 100,000 GitHub stars and more than 6,000 merged pull requests from external contributors — a level of community investment that Google's own announcement cited as evidence of the project's success. On June 18, 2026, Google will stop serving requests for free users, Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, and individual Gemini Code Assist users. Enterprise customers with paid Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise licenses are explicitly exempted: they keep Gemini CLI, keep model updates, and keep security patches.
