OpenClaude Breaks Anthropic's Lock and Runs Claude Code on Any Model
OpenClaude brings Claude Code's agentic workflow to 200+ models — OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek, Ollama, and more — all from one open-source CLI
- OpenClaude is a free, open-source CLI coding agent that brings Claude Code-style agentic workflows to 200+ models including OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Ollama.
- The latest update makes Codex the default provider and GPT-5.5 the default model, which achieves 82.7% on Terminal-Bench 2.0.
- Agent routing lets you map different subtasks to different models, e.g. cheap DeepSeek for exploration, GPT-4o for planning.
- Supports headless gRPC mode for embedding the agent into CI/CD pipelines or custom UIs with bidirectional streaming.
- Key limitations: smaller local models struggle with multi-step tool flows, and API keys are stored in plaintext in settings files.
- Available now via
npm install -g @gitlawb/openclaude— free and open source with 28,500+ GitHub stars and 93 contributors.
OpenClaude is a community-built, open-source coding agent CLI that takes the agentic workflow popularized by Anthropic's Claude Code and makes it work with virtually any model. It is an open-source coding-agent CLI for cloud and local model providers, supporting OpenAI-compatible APIs, Gemini, GitHub Models, Codex OAuth, Codex, Ollama, Atomic Chat, and other backends while keeping one terminal-first workflow: prompts, tools, agents, MCP, slash commands, and streaming output. The project has grown to over 28,500 stars and 8,700 forks, with more than 120,000 downloads and 93 contributors.
The problem it solves
Claude Code is one of the first AI coding tools developers trusted with merge-ready changes, because it can follow a single intent through multiple files, update related tests, and handle follow-on fixes without constant re-prompting. But it locks you into Anthropic's models and pricing. OpenClaude originated from the Claude Code codebase and has been substantially modified to support multiple model providers, agent routing, provider profiles, and an open development model. The result is a tool that gives you the same agentic coding loop , read files, run bash, edit code, loop , but lets you plug in whatever model you want.
What it actually does
It is an open-source coding agent CLI for OpenAI, Gemini, GitHub Models, Codex, and Ollama, supporting multi-step tool calling, web searches, and headless gRPC. The core workflow is built around a tool-calling loop: the model receives a task, decides which tools to invoke (bash, file read/write, grep, glob), executes them, sees the results, and keeps going until the task is done. This is the same pattern that makes Claude Code feel like a real coding partner rather than a fancy autocomplete.
This story is for Pro members
You've reached the end of the free preview. Upgrade to AlphaSignal Pro to read the full article - and everything else behind the paywall.
Comments
