Launching today
AICP (AI Consumption Protocol)
The standard for monetizing AI access to Open Source
5 followers
The standard for monetizing AI access to Open Source
5 followers
Open Source is in crisis. AI agents consume maintainers' work at scale, but give zero return. Some projects are now closing docs (e.g. Tailwind), hurting the community. AICP solves this with Freshness Gating: Stable N-1 (Previous): Always FREE. Ideal for students & startups. Stable N (Latest): Gated. AI agents need a Sponsor Token to unlock it. Enterprises pay for the "Fast Lane". The community stays free. Use aicp.json to align incentives.
I would like to see this become a standard that is adopted quickly and globally across OSS libraries. That may sound like a dream, because in practice it would mainly be adopted by projects that are already affected by economic pressure. Enthusiasts who maintain libraries without any monetization strategy would likely not care at all. For them, more code reads mean more satisfaction and energy to keep going. To be honest, there is still a large number of such projects on the market, and only some OSS initiatives actually make money not all maintainers benefit financially from open source.
OSS companies that try to monetize have adopted the enterprise model for open source some time ago. Kestra is a good example: it’s a great orchestration tool and while the free OSS version is already very strong, they still offer additional features in the enterprise edition. My agentic IDE might not state this directly (and this is where the AICP standard could help), but it’s not really hard to discover.
Congratulations on the AiCP launch. The idea of enabling secure, scalable sharing of AI assets with a protocol feels very forward-thinking and practical. This could open up exciting new ways for builders to collaborate. Wishing the team a successful launch day.