Warp Open-Sources Its Terminal Client Under AGPLv3 — OpenAI Founding Sponsor, Oz Agents Drive Contributions (April 28, 2026)

Warp on April 28, 2026 open-sourced its terminal client at github.com/warpdotdev/warp under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPLv3), with OpenAI signed on as founding sponsor and a new contribution model that routes most code changes through Warp's proprietary cloud agent platform Oz. Within roughly five days the repository had passed 53,000 stars and 3,600+ forks.

What Happened

Warp Labs — the San Francisco company that raised $50M in 2023 from Sequoia and GV to build an AI-first terminal — published the announcement on the company blog under the headline “Warp is now open-source.” The release puts the entire client codebase on GitHub under AGPLv3, with the smaller warpui_core and warpui UI crates carved out under the more permissive MIT license. The blog post frames the move as the start of “Open Agentic Development” — a model where community contributors define direction and verify output while AI agents do most of the implementation work.

Crucially, the agent platform itself — Oz — is staying closed. Oz is Warp's cloud orchestration layer that takes a prompt or GitHub issue, plans the change, runs tests, and opens a pull request against the open-source repo. Contributors are free to use other coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) to submit PRs, but Warp says Oz has “the correct skills and verification loops built-in” for the codebase. OpenAI is the founding sponsor of the repository and Oz's default coding agents run on GPT models, with broader open-model support — including Kimi, MiniMax, and Qwen — added in the same release alongside an auto (open) routing option that picks an open-weight model based on the task.

Key Details

• License: AGPLv3 for the bulk of the codebase; warpui_core and warpui crates under MIT to make UI components reusable in other projects.
• Founding sponsor: OpenAI. Oz's default agents run on GPT models; the partnership is positioned as supporting “the next generation of collaborative software development.”
• Broader model support: The same release added Kimi, MiniMax, and Qwen as first-class options inside Warp, plus an auto (open) routing mode that selects an open-weight model per task.
• Oz remains closed: The cloud agent orchestration platform that powers most contributions is proprietary; only the client is open-sourced.
• Repo momentum: 53,031 GitHub stars and 3,692 forks within the first week; the team has begun merging community pull requests.

What Developers Are Saying

Reaction on Hacker News and developer forums has been pointed and mixed. Two themes recur. First, longtime critics revived the grievance that Warp's earlier closed-source product was built on top of Alacritty's open code without meaningful upstream contributions, and that the company subsequently raised significant venture capital — turning the AGPLv3 release into, at best, a delayed return of borrowed value. Second, developers questioned the contribution model itself: Warp wants community members to file issues, spec features, and review pull requests, while the actual code is meant to be written by Oz. As one upvoted Hacker News commenter put it, anyone capable of contributing meaningful Rust is unlikely to file tickets for a GPT-powered agent to implement when they could just write the code themselves.

Coverage at The New Stack framed the release as a calculated bet against closed-source rivals like iTerm replacements and AI-native terminals from Anthropic and others, and at Help Net Security as a transparency win for security teams who can now audit a tool that previously sent commands and history to a remote server. EveryDev.ai's headline was blunt: “The real product is Oz.”

What This Means for Developers

Three concrete changes for anyone who already uses or has been evaluating Warp. First, the client can now be self-built and audited — useful for teams in regulated industries where shipping Warp internally previously required a vendor risk review and an exception. Second, AGPLv3 means anyone forking and offering Warp as a network service must publish their modifications, which deters embed-and-monetize forks more aggressively than MIT or Apache-2.0. Third, the open-model routing is shipped to all users, not just open-source contributors — Kimi, MiniMax, and Qwen are first-class inside the regular Warp app, which is a meaningful change for anyone who can't or doesn't want to send terminal context to OpenAI or Anthropic.

For prospective contributors, the open question is whether the Oz-mediated workflow feels like collaboration or like beta-testing someone else's agent. Watch the issue velocity and the ratio of community PRs to Oz-generated PRs over the next quarter.

What's Next

Warp says future Oz capabilities and the Warp Code workflow announced earlier in April will continue shipping into the open repo, and that more sponsors and model partners will be announced over the next two quarters. The company has also signaled it will document the Oz API surface so third-party agents can integrate with the same skills and verification loops Oz uses today. For now, the commit history and PR queue at github.com/warpdotdev/warp is the best leading indicator of whether Open Agentic Development sticks.

Sources

• Warp blog: “Warp is now open-source” — primary announcement.
• github.com/warpdotdev/warp — the open-sourced repository (AGPLv3).
• The New Stack: Warp's gamble: Going open source to take on closed-source rivals.
• Help Net Security: Warp open sources its AI terminal client.
• Hacker News discussion thread — community reaction.
• EveryDev.ai: “The real product is Oz” — analysis of the contribution model.