Meta Acquires Conductor: Cloud Shuts Down November 20

If you run coding agents in Conductor Cloud, you have until Friday, November 20 to get your work out. Meta acquires Conductor, the small startup that lets developers point several AI coding agents at one project at once, and the cloud half of the product is closing fast. The desktop app on your Mac gets a longer runway, into early 2027.

Meta confirmed the deal to TechCrunch on Wednesday but would not share terms or say anything more. Founder and CEO Charlie Holtz broke the news in a post on Conductor's own site, which also lays out the shutdown schedule in detail.

What Conductor did, and why Meta wanted it

Conductor launched in July 2025. Its pitch was simple: instead of chatting with one coding assistant, you spin up several agents, each in its own isolated workspace, and let them work on parallel tasks. The agents themselves came from the big labs, including Anthropic and OpenAI, rather than being built by Conductor. They could run in the cloud, on your machine, or from your phone.

The company raised a $22 million Series A in March 2026 from Spark and Matrix, according to its blog. Holtz said he is looking forward to working with Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman, who leads product at Meta Superintelligence Labs. He also hinted that the team has "big, crazy plans for the next interface" and that customers should expect something new by early next year.

For Meta, the purchase fits a push into developer tools. TechCrunch notes that Meta launched Muse Code in August and that Muse agents reportedly passed 10 million users. If you have been following how fast agent tools are spreading, the GitHub Copilot Fusion numbers show why every large company wants a piece of this.

The Conductor shutdown dates that matter

According to Conductor's announcement, the wind down happens in four stages:

• November 4: New sign ups and new downloads stopped. Existing users now pay nothing. Free users can no longer upgrade, but anyone already on Pro keeps Pro features at no cost.
• November 13: Conductor Cloud becomes read only. You can still open old chats and export data, but you cannot send new messages to cloud agents. Active subscribers get a refund.
• November 20: Conductor Cloud shuts down, and the company begins deleting cloud user data.
• Early 2027: The local Mac app keeps receiving new models and critical bug fixes until then, after which the app itself shuts down.

One detail is worth flagging. The timeline says cloud data deletion starts on November 20, while the FAQ on the same page says all Conductor user data will be deleted when the app shuts down in early 2027. The safest reading is that cloud data goes first and anything left goes later. Plan around the earlier date.

Who needs to act this week

Cloud users are the group with a real deadline. If your workspaces, branches or chat history live only in Conductor Cloud, they are the ones at risk on November 20. After November 13 you will not be able to keep working in them, only read and export.

Local only users can keep going for now. Your Mac app still works, and Conductor says it will keep adding models and fixing serious bugs into early 2027. Still, treat that as a migration window, not a permanent home.

Paying subscribers do not need to cancel anything to get money back. The company says active subscribers will receive a refund.

Teams evaluating Conductor are out of luck, since new sign ups are closed. Look at other agent tools instead, and read up on supply chain risk before you install one. The Claude Code extension backdoor that hit Cursor users last week is a good reminder to check what you are adding to your editor.

Your Conductor export checklist

Conductor's FAQ and changelog describe two ways to get data out. Work through these before November 13 so you still have full access if something goes wrong:

1. Open the Conductor app on your Mac and sign in.
2. For each cloud workspace you care about, right click it and choose Transfer to local. That moves the workspace and its chats onto your Mac.
3. For a full copy of everything, go to Settings, then Account, then Export data.
4. Make sure every branch your agents created has been pushed to your own Git remote. An export of chats is not the same as a backup of your code.
5. Store the export somewhere outside the app, such as a cloud drive or a separate repo, since the app itself is going away in early 2027.
6. Write down which agents and models you used for each project, so you can rebuild the same setup in another tool.

If you rely on a ChatGPT or Claude subscription inside Conductor, those plans belong to OpenAI and Anthropic, not to Conductor, so they are not affected by the shutdown. The recent ChatGPT Chat and Work tab merge is one place to look if you want to move agent work into Codex.

What Conductor says about your data

Conductor says it has never sold or trained on user data and will not start now. It has not said whether any customer data moves to Meta as part of the deal, and Meta declined to give details. If that question matters to your company, the export and delete route is the cleanest answer: pull your data out, then let the scheduled deletion handle the rest.

Holtz described the product launch as happening "a lifetime ago," and in AI tooling that is barely an exaggeration. Expect more small agent startups to be folded into big labs over the coming months. For more coverage like this, see our AI news section.