Jack Dorsey’s Block released Buzz on July 21, a free open-source collaboration platform where humans and AI agents work together in a shared workspace. The desktop app is available now for macOS, Windows, and Linux under an Apache 2.0 license.

What Buzz Does

Buzz combines team chat, Git hosting, and automated workflows into one platform. It has channels, threads, direct messages, voice, media sharing, and code repositories. The interface resembles Slack, according to TechCrunch, but with one structural difference: AI agents are full workspace members, not chatbot add-ons.

Each agent gets its own account with defined permissions. Agents can post messages, review code, kick off automations, and participate in conversations alongside human colleagues. “The agents are full members with their own accounts, not chatbots answering prompts,” SiliconANGLE reported.

Nostr as the Identity Layer

The platform is built on Nostr, the decentralized messaging protocol. Every participant, human or agent, holds a cryptographic keypair that belongs to them rather than the platform. A second signature ties each agent back to its human owner, creating what Block describes as a verifiable passport and audit trail.

This architecture makes agent identity portable. Agents configured in Buzz can participate across any Nostr-compatible system, and their history and reputation travel with them. “Every company is going to need a place where humans and agents work together,” Bradley Axen, head of AI capabilities at Block, said in the announcement. “The question is whether that place is proprietary or open. We built Buzz because we believe it should be open.”

Model-Agnostic, Self-Hostable

Buzz supports agents powered by any LLM or agent harness. According to Block’s blog post, Claude Code, Codex, and Block’s own goose framework all work through the Agent Client Protocol, an open standard for wiring coding agents into developer tools. Teams running their own instances control data, relay, and agents with nothing routing through a third party.

The built-in Git integration turns feature branches into channels, preserving patches, CI results, and review comments alongside the conversations that produced them.

Competitive Context

Dorsey described Buzz on X as “a new groupchat platform for teams of people and agents of all sizes, built to reduce our dependency on slack and github.” The launch positions Block against Salesforce’s Slack, Microsoft Teams, and GitHub simultaneously.

Block previously released goose, its open-source agent framework, in early 2025 and joined the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation in December alongside Anthropic and OpenAI, as SiliconANGLE noted. Buzz extends that push by providing the collaboration layer where those agents actually operate.

The product remains early. Block shipped version 0.4.22 at launch. Mobile clients and workflow approval gates are unfinished, and the company has not disclosed pricing for its hosted service or adoption figures beyond internal use at Block, according to SiliconANGLE.

The Open Collaboration Bet

Most companies investing in AI agents are building inside proprietary platforms controlled by a handful of providers. Block is betting the infrastructure for human-agent collaboration should be community-owned. Whether enterprise teams actually migrate off Slack and GitHub for an Apache-licensed v0.4 product from a payments company will test how much the “open” argument matters when the product still needs to mature.