Gemini CLI Is Being Retired: Move to Antigravity CLI (2026)

If your terminal workflow leans on the gemini command, there's a date you need on your calendar: June 18, 2026. That's when Google retires the free Gemini CLI and moves everyone to its replacement, Antigravity CLI.

This isn't a rename. The free quota that made Gemini CLI worth recommending to beginners is being cut hard, and the tool itself changes character. Here's exactly what's happening and what to do about it.

What's Actually Changing

Google announced at I/O 2026 (May 19) that Gemini CLI is being transitioned to Antigravity CLI. On June 18, 2026, Gemini CLI and the Gemini Code Assist IDE extensions stop serving requests for individual-tier accounts: free users, Google AI Pro, and Google AI Ultra.

The replacement is Antigravity CLI, invoked as the agy command. It's part of Google's broader Antigravity platform and shares architecture with the Antigravity desktop app. It's built in Go, runs background async workflows, and is backed by the Gemini 3 model family.

One exception: organizations on Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise licenses keep CLI access and aren't affected by the June 18 cutoff. This change targets individual and free users — which is exactly who the original Gemini CLI review was written for.

The Catch: The Free Tier Got Cut ~98%

Here's the part that actually matters for beginners and hobbyists.

Gemini CLI's headline was a genuinely generous free tier — up to 1,000 requests per day on a personal Google account, no credit card. That's what made it a real zero-cost on-ramp.

Antigravity CLI's free tier is reported at around 20 requests per day — roughly a 98% reduction. The five-minute binary swap is easy; the capacity shortfall is the problem. If you ever ran Gemini CLI in a loop, in a script, or across a long coding session, 20 requests will run dry fast.

It's also no longer open source. Gemini CLI was Apache 2.0 and auditable; Antigravity CLI is closed-source. If you chose the tool because it was open, the replacement doesn't carry that property forward.

What To Do Before June 18

If you want to stay on Google's path: install Antigravity CLI and migrate now, don't wait for the cutoff.

# Install Antigravity CLI (the new agy command)
# from the official Antigravity site, then sign in:
agy

The migration takes under ten minutes for most setups, and existing Gemini CLI config carries over. Just go in knowing the free tier is much smaller — re-point any scripts that called gemini and test them against the new quota before you depend on them. For a closer look at whether the replacement is actually worth it, see our Antigravity CLI review.

If the free-tier cut is a dealbreaker: this is a good moment to switch to a tool you control rather than one Google can re-meter.

• Goose — free, open-source, model-agnostic. You can still plug in a Gemini API key, or run fully local models through Ollama for zero per-request cost. This is the closest spiritual replacement for "free terminal agent."
• OpenCode — open-source terminal agent, BYOK across providers.
• For the full ranking of what's genuinely free now, see our best free terminal AI coding agents roundup; for paid options, compare what the CLIs actually charge in our AI coding tool cost breakdown.

The Bottom Line

For individual users, the free Gemini CLI effectively ends on June 18, 2026. Antigravity CLI replaces it, but with a much smaller free quota and no open-source guarantee — so the "generous free terminal agent" reason people picked Gemini CLI doesn't survive the move.

If you're a light user, migrate to agy and you'll likely be fine. If you ran anything at volume or valued the open-source angle, treat this as your prompt to move to a tool you own — Goose with a local model is the cleanest way to keep a genuinely free terminal agent.