Meta bought Conductor: what dev teams must do before Nov. 20
Meta acquired AI coding startup Conductor on Nov. 4. The consequence for any team actively using the platform: a hard deadline to get their data out before it’s gone.
Conductor Cloud, the startup’s hosted service, goes read-only this Friday. It shuts down completely one week later. Customer data deletion begins Nov. 20. Those dates are not negotiable.
What to export before Nov. 13
The read-only cutover is the first hard wall. Before then, teams need to pull:
- Cloud workspaces
- Chats and activity logs
- Agent settings, prompts, and instructions
Conductor supports exporting to a Mac or downloading an archive through account settings. The local application will continue receiving model support and critical bug fixes until early next year, but the company has not committed to anything beyond that.
The harder problem: rebuilding how your team worked
Jeet Pattanaik, SAP API program manager and founder and CTO of Glokal AI, put it bluntly:
“Moving the code is the easy part. Rebuilding the way your team actually worked is much harder.”
Conductor was built around coordinating multiple AI coding agents across a shared interface, supporting agents from Anthropic and OpenAI among others. Teams that built review, testing, and coordination workflows on top of that infrastructure will need to reconstruct those patterns from scratch on a new platform, even if the underlying models remain available elsewhere.
Conductor reported in a March funding update that engineers at Google, Meta, HubSpot, Amazon, and Spotify were using the platform. That’s the profile of team most at risk here: real production workflows, not just experiments.
What to build into vendor contracts going forward
Rebecca Wettemann, CEO and principal analyst at Valoir, laid out what enterprises should negotiate before signing with any AI vendor:
- The right to export all data at any time, at no additional cost, in open and documented formats
- Restrictions on using customer code, prompts, and outputs to train models that remain binding after an acquisition
- Penalty-free termination rights
- Refunds for prepaid fees if the service shuts down
- At least 90 days’ notice of discontinuation
- Continued support during a wind-down period, plus transition assistance
For contrast: on the same day Meta disclosed the Conductor purchase, OpenAI announced plans to acquire Pierre Computer, another developer-tools startup. OpenAI said Pierre Code Storage customers could continue using the service after closing and that open source projects would remain open. Two acquisitions, two very different approaches to continuity.
The exit plan principle
Pattanaik’s advice applies well beyond Conductor: keep prompts, agent logic, and tests in company-controlled systems like internal code repositories. And as he put it:
“Plan your exit the day you sign up, not the day the shutdown email lands. That way the platform is something you use, not somewhere you live.”
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