The Zulip Foundation

> It’s hard these days to feel confident that a company whose product you love won’t yield to commercial pressure and start selling your data, putting in ads, or otherwise violating your trust. It’s been a challenge to convincingly make the case that this won’t happen to Zulip, especially to folks who might not have time to investigate deeply. The Zulip Foundation, which has the goal of serving the public good, makes this so much easier to communicate clearly.

As a huge fan of Zulip the app and the team behind it, I have intensely mixed feelings about the AI-ness of it all. But this does seem to be the most responsible way forward.

Zulip needed to be able to outlast its founders to be a truly sustainable project. The way they've focused on building up their contribution pipeline, the effort they spend on mentoring new developers, it has all built towards that being possible.

https://blog.zulip.com/2021/12/17/why-zulip-will-stand-the-t...

It seems like just yesterday that the core team started experimenting with using Claude to work on Zulip, which maybe adds to the surprise of this announcement. But I don't begrudge those individuals their choices. Ten+ years is a long time to work on any project.

https://blog.zulip.com/2025/11/24/zulip-ten-years/

Here's to the Zulip project continuing to maintain its engineering excellence and its community principles for the next ten years.

Zulip means a lot to me, as it has been my introduction to open source through Google Summer of Code, and my first time actually working on a real codebase of a project that so many people love. I'm excited about the Zulip Foundation as a new start; at the same time, I'm also a bit sad about the departure of the core team members. While I'm obviously biased, I can totally see the optics for people coming from Bun's acquisition—this is not that. Knowing Tim for 5 years, I'm confident that an incredible amount of thought has been put into this, and that this is in Zulip's best interest for its sustainability and integrity. I hope Zulip and team all the best for the next 10 years and more to come.

> I’m stepping back from full-time Zulip leadership to join Anthropic, alongside three senior team members, and we’re donating the company to a newly created, independent, nonprofit Zulip Foundation

Not trying to be cynical … but announcing on a Friday afternoon is typically the operating mode for when you need to announce something that you do not want to get noticed.

I can only speculate this weeks Bun/Rust news might have played into how this Zulip news is being handled.

To be clear, excited for Tim & team.

I've only used Zulip when checking out the Lean Zulip a few years ago, and I thought it was an infinitely better interface than Discord for serious discussion, and also much easier for lurkers to find information. I wish more projects adopted it.

For those looking for more context on Zulip, we did a major release a couple weeks ago: https://blog.zulip.com/2026/04/27/zulip-12-0-released/.

Congrats to Tim and the rest of the team!

I've been a happy Zulip user (and realm admin) for 13 years: it's one of my favorite pieces of software, and I use it daily. My understanding is these changes will be very good for Zulip's long-term stability and success.

(I'm a volunteer member of the new foundation's advisory board.)

Gotta love the frontier labs annihilating open source projects left and right either by acquiring them directly or stealing the teams.

I've long thought that we need a name for what Zulip is other than "team chat." IMO it's different qualitatively than slack/mattermost/discord/teams &c.

Reads like Anthropic has recognized that in order to better get into enterprise it needs to be better than Slack - meet users where they are most of the time. Having someone experienced with a good reputation and a say on how to steer a product sounds quite beneficial.

Concretely, how are you going to manage PR reviews? Even with today’s staff they are very slow (weeks for a round of NITS at a time), so with more developers leaving they’re going to explode and further discourage external contributors.

Not sure what to term this as it's an acqui-hire without the acquire, but why did Anthropic want to poach most of Zulip/Kandra's team?

The front page of Hacker News was not exactly the place where I was expecting to discover that you were changing jobs, but congrats, Tim!

This article would have been fine and a good send-off if the maintainers just said they were moving on to greener pastures. The discussion of the Anthropic job offer and the cult-like praise of them seems out of place, especially the unnecessary defensiveness in the tone.

It’s okay to make money and change up your career! But this communication is bizarre.

> I’m stepping back from Zulip to join Anthropic because of its remarkable commitment to the responsible development of AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.

I cannot quite agree to this. But nonetheless I wish good luck to the Zulip project.

> Over the last few months, I’ve been reflecting deeply on the myriad ways in which AI is changing the world, and how it might change the world in the future. And I came to the conclusion that it’s vitally important that we navigate this strange adolescence of technology well, and that I should contribute to this cause more directly than I ever could as the CEO of Kandra Labs.

The compensation for a senior developer at Anthropic is also certainly much better than a FOSS nonprofit - I'm sure that had nothing to do with his reasoning.

Sad to see yet another longtime open source developer begin working for AI companies that disregard free software licenses for their training and enable the deluge of low quality AI pull requests that waste maintainers' time.

Wait, don't they know that the best way for your newly corporate orphaned quasi-source project to flourish is to donate it to the Apache Software Foundation?

bro just say: "Anthropic is going to pay me a beefy salary and it's exciting!" what's this salad come on: "I’m stepping back from Zulip to join Anthropic because of its remarkable commitment to the responsible development of AI for the long-term benefit of humanity."

it's pretty funny

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