Meta buys Conductor, the app that runs a squad of coding agents side by side

The tool a lot of developers used to babysit five coding agents at once now belongs to Meta. The company has acquired Conductor, a startup whose app runs several AI coding agents in parallel, Duncan Riley reports for SiliconANGLE, following Axios, which broke the deal. Conductor confirmed it on its site. Nobody disclosed a price.

What Conductor did

The pitch: one developer, many agents, no collisions. Every agent got its own isolated copy of the repository, so they could work side by side without trampling each other's changes. When they were done, the developer reviewed the output and merged whatever was worth keeping. It worked with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, and users brought their own subscriptions and API keys.

The Mac app was the main product. Conductor Cloud ran agents in sandboxed virtual machines for hours at a stretch, with an iPhone app for checking in on them. The company says more than 100,000 people use it. Meta's engineers were among them long before the deal: when Conductor announced a $22 million Series A from Spark Capital and Matrix in March, it named Meta, Google and Spotify as companies where dozens of engineers already used it.

Why Meta wants it

Axios's sources say Meta is buying the team's shipping speed as much as the app, to help it build the AI coding tools it ships next. That fits. Last month Meta shipped Muse Spark Open, an open-weights model pitched at coding and long-running agent work, while keeping its stronger Muse Wonder models inside its own Muse Code terminal and API.

That same day, OpenAI announced plans to buy developer tools startup Pierre Computer, after announcing a deal in June for Ona, a company that puts coding agents in cloud sandboxes. The labs no longer want to just sell models to the tools developers use. They want to own the tools.

The shutdown schedule

If you use Conductor, read this part twice.

• New sign-ups and downloads stopped today. Pro subscribers get their paid features free in the meantime.
• Conductor Cloud goes read-only on November 13 and shuts on November 20. After that, the company starts deleting stored data, so export it or move your workspaces onto your own machine first. Active subscribers get refunds.
• Installed copies of the Mac app keep running into early 2027, when the team plans to ship a new interface it hasn't described. At that point new models and critical fixes stop, and the app's user data is deleted.

Conductor says it has never sold user data or used it for training, and has no plans to.

The lesson for anyone building a workflow around a startup's agent harness: the harness is now strategic, which also makes it acquirable. Keep your setup portable.

Scoreboard update: AI +1. Meta buys the app that lets one developer run a whole team of coding agents.

Stay undead.