Anaconda buys Kilo, the open source coding agent that answers to no single model maker
The New Stack Paul Sawers
Anaconda just bought Kilo, the open-source coding agent that lets devs swap AI models freely instead of getting stuck with one. It's a bet that enterprises are done trusting a single AI vendor with their whole codebase.
Based on reporting by The New Stack, Paul Sawers — read the original for the full story.
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Anaconda, the company famous for keeping enterprise Python installs sane, has picked up Kilo, an open-source coding agent that refuses to marry any single AI model provider. The timing isn't subtle. Over the past two weeks alone, Palantir's Alex Karp and Mistral's Arthur Mensch have both warned that closed-model vendors are quietly accumulating leverage over enterprise data, and Satya Nadella made a version of the same point. Anaconda, a company built on the premise that enterprises will trust open tooling if it's governed properly, is now betting that logic extends to AI coding assistants too.
Kilo has real numbers behind it: more than 3 million developers, close to 10 trillion tokens routed through the platform monthly, and access to over 500 models from 60-plus providers. It launched in March 2025, founded by GitLab's Sid Sijbrandij, and grew out of the ashes of Roo Code after that project abandoned its IDE extension for a cloud-only setup. Kilo picked up the orphaned users and ran, racking up more than 26,000 GitHub stars along the way. New CEO Scott Breitenother now runs the show after founding CEO Jan Paul Posma stepped back in September for personal reasons.
What Anaconda's new CEO David DeSanto, who arrived in October after six years running product at GitLab, is really selling is a fix for a governance gap nobody wants to admit exists. Enterprises are stuck choosing between locking developers into one vendor or letting them loose with zero visibility, and DeSanto calls both options fake strategies. He's got a name for the resulting mess too: tokenmaxxing, where companies chase raw token volume as a stand-in for productivity without any way to tell if that spend is actually buying results. Multiply that across dozens of tools and personal accounts, and you get enterprise AI budgets nobody can actually account for.
The plan is to fold Kilo into Anaconda's existing AI workspace without disturbing the parts developers already like — VS Code, JetBrains, and CLI workflows stay put, just with Anaconda's vetted packages and governed models sitting underneath. Over the next year, that's supposed to deepen into a single pipeline where code moves from a developer's laptop into production without hopping platforms, and without losing whatever policy constraints got attached to it along the way. This isn't Anaconda's first move in this direction either; back in April it bought Outerbounds, the Netflix-born orchestration company behind Metaflow, which handles what happens after code needs to run reliably at scale.
The broader fight over this layer of the stack is getting crowded fast. Tools like OpenCode, Cline, and Aider are all chasing the same model-agnostic pitch, while Cursor went the opposite direction in June, buying Continue and pulling it into a closed commercial IDE. Anaconda's bet is that neutrality, backed by actual governance infrastructure, beats both the walled gardens and the free-for-alls — and that enough enterprises are nervous enough about vendor lock-in to pay for the difference.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
I've watched enough companies get burned trusting their entire dev workflow to one model vendor's roadmap to think Anaconda's read on this is correct — the token-volume flex everyone's doing right now is vanity metrics dressed up as strategy. But acquiring the neutral tool and folding it into your own governed platform is its own kind of lock-in, just with better manners; keep an eye on whether Kilo stays genuinely open or quietly becomes an Anaconda upsell funnel.
Read more about this at: The New Stack
