Google cuts off Gemini CLI on June 18 — what actually stops, and your three real options

If your daily driver is Gemini CLI on a Google AI Pro or Ultra subscription — or the free tier — you have a hard date. From Google’s announcement, verbatim:

“On June 18, 2026, Gemini CLI and Gemini Code Assist IDE extensions will stop serving requests for Google AI Pro and Ultra, as well as those using it free of charge.”

That’s two weeks from this article’s publication. No grace period has been announced since the May 19 post, and the project’s releases right up through v0.45.1 (June 4) mention no extension. The date stands.

But the panic version of this story — “Google killed the open-source CLI” — gets the mechanics wrong in ways that matter for what you should actually do. So let’s be precise about what dies, what survives, and the three real exits.

What exactly stops on June 18

Read that table twice, because it reframes the decision: the binary survives; the subsidized request path dies. What ends is using your $20/$125-a-month consumer subscription (or $0) as the fuel for an open-source agent. What replaces it, in Google’s plan, is the Antigravity CLI — which is where the controversy starts.

Option 1 — Follow Google to Antigravity CLI

The replacement is agy: a Go binary installed via curl script or Homebrew (no npm), available to every Google AI Pro and Ultra account, sharing — per the docs — “the same core agent engine” as the Antigravity 2.0 desktop app, with async workflows for long tasks. It is also closed-source: the GitHub repo hosts docs, a changelog, and an issue tracker, but no code.

On what carries over from Gemini CLI, Google’s wording is worth quoting exactly, caveat included:

“While there won’t be 1:1 feature parity right out of the gate, we made sure Antigravity CLI keeps the most critical features of Gemini CLI: Agent Skills, Hooks, Subagents, and Extensions (now as Antigravity plugins).”

So skills, hooks, and subagents come along, and extensions get rebranded as plugins. Two things we could not verify in any primary source, so treat them as unknowns: whether your GEMINI.md / settings / MCP server config migrate automatically, and whether any agy migrate command exists (we found no documentation of one). There is an official migration guide — walk through it with your actual config before the deadline rather than assuming.

What the community says is missing is the more useful signal. From the issue tracker, sorted by reactions as of June 4:

• Open-source petition — 213 reactions. Issue #4 asks Google to open the code “same as gemini-cli.” No response from Google. The Register’s headline captured the mood: swapped for a closed-source AI.
• No ACP support — 96 reactions. Issue #31 requests the Agent Client Protocol stdio mode that gemini-cli --acp has today. Until that lands, editors that drive agents over ACP — Zed most visibly — lose their Gemini path when the old CLI’s subscription serving stops (Zed discussion).
• The long tail: “not ready to be a gemini-cli replacement” (24), proxy settings broken (23), no API-key auth for headless/CI (#78, 16), no Termux/ARM Android build (16), credential persistence bugs (15), and geo-availability errors in some regions.

Honest take: if you live in the interactive terminal, on a Pro/Ultra plan, in a supported region, Antigravity CLI is the path of least resistance — your subscription keeps paying for inference and the core workflow concepts survive. If your Gemini CLI usage is plumbing — ACP into an editor, headless in CI, scripted with an API key — Antigravity CLI cannot replace it today. Those gaps are exactly what the top issues document.

Option 2 — Stay on Gemini CLI with an API key

The quiet option Google itself left open: keep the exact tool you have. The repo stays Apache-2.0 and actively maintained, and API-key requests keep working after June 18. What changes is the cost model: from a flat subscription to pay-per-token through AI Studio or Vertex. For light-to-moderate use that can be cheaper than a subscription; for heavy agentic sessions it can be much more expensive — meter a typical week before you commit.

Two notes from our fact-check worth knowing:

• You don’t need a fork. We checked the fork graph: nothing credible has diverged (newest forks are 0–2-star auto-mirrors). And nothing needs to — upstream is open and alive. There’s even a community AI SDK provider wrapping @google/gemini-cli-core if you build on it.
• This is the only path that keeps ACP today. If Zed-style editor integration is your workflow, an API key on the existing CLI is currently the only Google-model answer.

Option 3 — Take the open-source slot elsewhere

If the closed-source turn is the dealbreaker — judging by 213 reactions, for many it is — the open agents all drive Gemini models with an API key:

• Cline — added Gemini 3.5 Flash to its Gemini and Vertex providers in v3.85.0 (May 25); shipping weekly.
• OpenClaw — full Gemini family via google/* routing. One warning: its unofficial Gemini-CLI-OAuth mode is documented as risky (account restrictions) — use the API-key path.
• aider — aider --model gemini, long-standing support.
• Router layer — LiteLLM (gemini/ prefix) or OpenRouter if you want to keep the agent and swap models freely.

The two-week checklist

1. Classify your usage today. Interactive terminal on Pro/Ultra → Option 1. ACP/editor, CI, scripts → Option 2. Closed-source dealbreaker → Option 3.
2. If Option 1: install agy now, run it against a real project for a day, and walk the official migration guide with your GEMINI.md, settings, and MCP servers — auto-migration is not documented, so verify by hand. Check your region works before June 18, not after.
3. If Option 2: create the API key, set a billing alert, and meter one normal week of usage before the deadline so the subscription-vs-tokens math is yours, not a guess.
4. If Option 3: stand up the replacement agent with a Gemini API key in parallel — keep both until the new one has survived a real task.
5. Whatever you choose, export your config now. GEMINI.md, settings, MCP definitions, custom skills/hooks — into git, before the tool stops answering on the path you currently use.
6. Re-check the announcement on June 17. No extension exists as of June 4 — but you want to learn of one from the source, not from your CLI going quiet.

Companion reading

• State of AI Coding Agents — June 2026 — the full late-May ledger this story leads.
• Every popular Claude Code workflow is the same five steps — why skills/hooks/subagents survive every vendor transition: the pipeline is the portable part.
• Running a fleet of long-lived AI agents — if the migration tempts you to run more than one agent, keep their memory from bleeding together.

Sources: Google Developers Blog announcement (May 19, 2026; sunset wording, API-key and enterprise carve-outs, carry-over list quoted verbatim); gemini-cli Discussion #27274; gemini-cli repo (Apache-2.0, not archived, v0.45.1 June 4); Antigravity CLI getting-started and issue tracker (#4, #31, #73, #78 reaction counts as of June 4, 2026); Zed discussion #57221; Cline v3.85.0; OpenClaw, aider, LiteLLM, OpenRouter docs. Unverified-by-primary-source items (config auto-migration, agy migrate, quota figures) are marked as such in the text.