Is Claude Code open source?
No. The licence in Anthropic's public repository reads © Anthropic PBC. All rights reserved., with use governed by Anthropic's Commercial Terms — not an open-source licence. The npm package declares SEE LICENSE IN README.md rather than MIT or Apache. What that repository does hold is issues, a changelog, plugins and examples; the application's source code isn't published there.
SEE LICENSE IN README.md, not an SPDX id ✓ Plugins and examples in that repo are public and reusable ✓ MCP is an open standard — the protocol, not the client Read the licence file and the package manifest — they both say the same thing.
LICENSE.md in anthropics/claude-code carries two lines that settle it: "© Anthropic PBC. All rights reserved." and a pointer to Anthropic's Commercial Terms of Service. Neither the OSI nor anyone else would call that an open-source licence; there is no grant to modify or redistribute.
The npm manifest agrees. @anthropic-ai/claude-code (version 2.1.220 at the time of writing) sets "license": "SEE LICENSE IN README.md" — the convention publishers use precisely when the licence is not one of the standard identifiers. An MIT or Apache-2.0 project simply says so in that field.
So what is in the public repository? Issues and pull requests, the changelog, plugins, examples, and configuration — a community and distribution hub. Useful, genuinely public, and not the application. This matters because Google's AI Overview for this cluster currently states the opposite, and several ranking articles repeat it.
Why people think otherwise.
The confusion is understandable. github.com/anthropics/claude-code looks like every open-source project you've ever used: stars, thousands of issues, pull requests, a changelog, a plugins directory. What it doesn't have is the code that runs when you type claude.
Vendors use GitHub as a support desk and distribution point all the time. The tell is the licence file — and here it says all rights reserved.
It's worth being precise rather than sweeping, because parts of the ecosystem are open:
- MCP — the Model Context Protocol is an open standard for connecting AI tools to data sources. The protocol is open; the client that speaks it is not.
- Plugins, skills and examples published in that repository are public and made to be copied.
- Your own configuration —
CLAUDE.md, hooks, skills — is yours, in your repo, in plain text.
None of that makes the product open source, and conflating the two is where most of the wrong answers come from.
People usually ask this question for a reason: an audit requirement, a policy against proprietary tooling in the build chain, a wish to self-host, or simple preference. If any of those is your case, the answer isn't to hope — it's to pick a tool whose licence you can read. The options below are Apache-2.0 and can run against models you host yourself.
Related and often conflated: whether it runs offline (it doesn't) and whether it's free (it isn't). Open source, offline, and free are three separate questions that this cluster tends to blur into one.
Agents you can actually read.
Both publish their source under a permissive licence and can point at a locally hosted model. We have not benchmarked either against Claude Code — capability tracks the model you give them.
Frequently asked.
Quick follow-ups people search after this question.
Q · 01 But there's a GitHub repository — isn't that open source? +
LICENSE.md reserves all rights.