Cline Acqui-Hired by OpenAI: What Happens When Open Source Gets Acquired

Published on 29.01.2026

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Was Cline Just Acqui-Hired by OpenAI?

TLDR: Reading the tea leaves of Tech Twitter and LinkedIn suggests OpenAI has acqui-hired the Cline team into Codex. Kilo is responding by making their backend source-available and offering credits to Cline contributors to keep the open-source coding agent community alive.

Was Cline just acqui-hired by OpenAI?

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