Key findings
- AI SDK 5 shipped on July 31, 2025, 6 on December 22, 2025, and 7 on June 25, 2026.
- The ai package published 244 stable versions between July 12 and October 12, 2026, across the 5, 6, and 7 lines, which all received patches on October 12.
- Weekly npm downloads of ai rose from about 0.4 million in October 2024 to 31.0 million in the week to October 11, 2026.
- In that week ai was downloaded about 8 times as often as @langchain/langgraph and about 14 times as often as @openai/agents.
- Teams report behavior changes that still compile at each major. BrainGrid's migration of 14 tools took a couple of days.
Budget an upgrade project for every AI SDK major. Three majors shipped in eleven months, each renamed APIs that production code uses, and Vercel keeps patching the older lines. Adoption grew through all of it, and the ai package is downloaded far more often than LangGraph.js or the OpenAI Agents SDK.
Majors and their pace
The npm registry dates each major of the ai package: 3.0.0 on February 29, 2024, 4.0.0 on November 18, 2024. Later versions were 5.0.0 on July 31, 2025, 6.0.0 on December 22, 2025, and 7.0.0 on June 25, 2026. AI SDK 5 rebuilt messages into typed parts and renamed tool fields. AI SDK 6 added ToolLoopAgent and tool approval. AI SDK 7 added WorkflowAgent, HarnessAgent for running existing agents such as Claude Code and Codex, timeouts, and a telemetry rewrite, and dropped CommonJS and Node.js versions before 22.
Vercel maintains the older lines under the npm tags ai-v5 and ai-v6, and on October 12, 2026 it published 5.0.274, 6.0.304, and 7.0.138. It publishes no end-of-support date for the older lines, so track those tags and plan each upgrade around your own launches.
| Month | Stable versions |
|---|---|
| January | 68 |
| February | 56 |
| March | 58 |
| April | 49 |
| May | 27 |
| June | 50 |
| July | 74 |
| August | 88 |
| September | 83 |
| October 1 to 12 | 20 |
npm registry release times for the ai package, versions without a prerelease tag, retrieved Oct 12, 2026
Adoption
Weekly npm downloads of ai grew about 76-fold in the two years to Oct 12, 2026, rising fastest after AI SDK 6. The npm figure counts dependency installs and CI runs, so it measures installations across projects and pipelines and overstates the number of teams.
On GitHub, vercel/ai had 27,277 stars and 5,307 forks on October 12, 2026. Vercel's own announcements cited over 2 million weekly downloads in July 2025 and over 16 million in June 2026.
| Week ending | ai | @langchain/langgraph | @openai/agents |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 11, 2024 | 409,337 | 41,976 | 0 |
| Apr 11, 2025 | 1,015,304 | 179,634 | 0 |
| Oct 10, 2025 | 3,578,966 | 541,484 | 105,131 |
| Apr 10, 2026 | 10,505,460 | 2,004,043 | 519,386 |
| Jul 10, 2026 | 16,548,989 | 2,861,237 | 1,298,106 |
| Oct 11, 2026 | 31,019,538 | 3,795,517 | 2,282,139 |
npm downloads API, point counts for each seven-day window, retrieved Oct 12, 2026
What upgrades cost
BrainGrid moved 14 tools from AI SDK 4.3.16 to the 5 beta in a couple of days. It reported renamed fields, a type overhaul, and a token counter that broke on the new message parts. A benchmark suite on AI SDK 7 kept an accessor whose meaning changed and lost tool history across 114 follow-up turns until its author switched to responseMessages.
Provider packages move too. A team's Bedrock structured output degraded after a provider release switched to native structured output, and Sourcebot waited on a community Ollama provider to support AI SDK 5.
Security record
GitHub's Advisory Database listed one reviewed advisory for the ai package on Oct 12, 2026: GHSA-rwvc-j5jr-mgvh, a low-severity bypass of file type allowlists in uploads, fixed in 5.0.52 and published November 7, 2025.
Methodology
GILD count from the npm registry's release times for the ai package and the npm downloads API, retrieved on October 12, 2026; a stable version is one without a prerelease tag. GitHub figures are from the vercel/ai repository page and the GitHub Advisory Database on the same date. Release dates and features are from Vercel's announcements and migration guides, and upgrade experiences from the public accounts listed in Sources.
Products in this piece
Sources
- Official documentation
- 7
- Public source
- 8
- Vercel blog: AI SDK 5 (Jul 31, 2025)
- Vercel blog: AI SDK 6 (Dec 22, 2025)
- Vercel blog: AI SDK 7 (Jun 25, 2026)
- AI SDK docs: Migration guide, AI SDK 7.0
- vercel/ai releases on GitHub
- vercel/ai on GitHub (stars, forks, commits)
- AI SDK docs: Harnesses overview
- npm: the ai package, versions and weekly downloads (as of Oct 12, 2026)
- npm: @langchain/langgraph, versions and weekly downloads (as of Oct 12, 2026)
- npm: @openai/agents, versions and weekly downloads (as of Oct 12, 2026)
- GitHub Advisory Database: GHSA-rwvc-j5jr-mgvh, AI SDK file type allowlist bypass, fixed in 5.0.52 (Nov 7, 2025)
- Felipe Cadavid, BrainGrid blog: Migrating to AI SDK v5 (Jul 24, 2025)
- Kevin Peckham, Lightning Jar: A deprecated accessor that still typechecks broke my benchmark (Jul 6, 2026)
- vercel/ai issue #17881: Bedrock native structured output degenerates on claude-sonnet-4-6 (Jul 23, 2026)
- Hacker News comment from the Sourcebot team on the Ollama provider and AI SDK 5 (Jul 31, 2025)