Block Buzz launches as open-source rival to Slack and GitHub for AI agents and humans

Fresh off AI layoffs, Block now wants to whack Slack with agent-human collab tool

After cutting over 4,000 jobs due to AI, fintech biz Block is back with Buzz, a shared workspace where humans and bots can collaborate in ways that are more auditable, sovereign, and secure than what you can do in chat tools such as Slack. Block's human-bot co-op is built upon a turducken of tech jargon: The platform is free and open source. It's based on the decentralized Nostr protocol, so there's cryptographic identity. It's "sovereign," a naively optimistic term readers of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash should recognize, which in this context means self-hostable. And it's intended as a replacement for Slack, GitHub, and various other communication and collaboration tools. If "Buzz" sounds familiar, that's because Google used that name in a social media faceplant more than 15 years ago. For those who missed the first go-around, Google Buzz, a failed social media service, gave rise to Google+, also a failed social media service. Block appears to believe that a decade and a half is sufficient for a brand cleanse. The project's GitHub repo offers a more apologetic assessment: "Yes, it's another AI-adjacent developer tool. We're sorry. The difference is what agents can actually do once they're inside: open repos, send patches, review code, run workflows, edit canvases, orchestrate other agents, drop into voice huddles, create channels, and pull in whoever needs to see it. The same affordances as a human teammate, the same audit trail, a different keypair." You can already sic software agents on collaborative workspaces. Block's main insight is that it would be useful to link AI agents with cryptographic identities. Others have already arrived at that conclusion. Hence OWASP's Agent Name Service, DNS for AI Discovery, Estonia's digital IDs for agents, and so on. But Buzz's badging of humans and bots with cryptographic key pairs is bound to tick governance boxes. "Every company is going to need a place where humans and agents work together," said Bradley Axen, head of AI capabilities at Block, in a statement. "The question is whether that place is proprietary or open. We built Buzz because we believe it should be open." Moat-seeking tech incumbents would probably disagree about the need for openness, even though they're fond of using the word without applying it. We note that OpenAI sells closed AI. And Anthropic's decision to disallow third-party tools from using Claude subscriptions highlights the seemingly inevitable path from openness to barriers when revenue is at stake. What's more, it's not obvious that every company will need people and bots in the same space. There's a strong case for keeping humans and agents apart because they work at different speeds. Git at least was built for handling many distributed code edits, pull requests, and merges. It's hard to see how people and bots can share a text-based communication space unless the bots are rate-limited or just talk among themselves. "The bet is that one community can do what teams currently fake with chat, forges, bots, CI dashboards, release tools, search indexes, and a pile of glue code," Block's Buzz developers state. "Not all at once, not magically, but with one substrate instead of seven tabs pretending they know about each other." If tools for these sorts of things didn't already exist, and no large tech companies had designs on this space, Buzz might face less daunting odds. But it's worth a shot. ®

Jack Dorsey's Block takes on Slack with Buzz

Buzz is free, open-source, and built on the Nostr protocol Dorsey champions. Its pitch: agent collaboration should be owned by the companies using it, not locked inside a handful of proprietary platforms. Jack Dorsey's Block wants to take on Slack. The twist is that the workforce it is building for is half machine. Its new app, Buzz, is an open-source workspace where humans and AI agents share the same channels, and every agent carries its own portable identity. Block, the Dorsey-led fintech behind Square and Cash App, has released Buzz, a free, open-source platform for humans and AI agents to work together. Reviewers have framed it as a direct challenge to Slack, one built for the age of agents. On the surface it looks familiar. Buzz has channels, threads, direct messages, voice, media sharing, code repositories, and automated workflows. Anyone who has used a modern team chat tool will recognise it. Agents as colleagues, not assistants The difference sits underneath. In Buzz, AI agents are not bots waiting for a command. Each one has its own cryptographic identity, defined permissions, and the ability to post, review code, run approved automations, and join conversations. Multiple agents and multiple humans share a workspace and build on each other's work. "Every company is going to need a place where humans and agents work together," said Bradley Axen, Block's Head of AI Capabilities. "The question is whether that place is proprietary or open. We built Buzz because we believe it should be open." It is model-agnostic. Teams can plug in agents built on any model or harness, such as Claude Code, Codex, or Block's own goose. They can bring their own, or build new ones. The identity bet Buzz runs on Nostr, the decentralised protocol Dorsey has long backed. Block chose it to solve what it calls the core problem of multi-agent work: identity. Every participant, human or agent, holds a cryptographic keypair that belongs to them, not to the platform. That means an agent's identity is not tied to a vendor's API key. It is portable and verifiable, and it can move across any Nostr-compatible system, carrying its history and reputation with it. It echoes a wider push to give agents a durable identity system of their own. Open versus locked in Block's real argument is about control. Most companies are building their agent infrastructure inside proprietary platforms run by a handful of providers, which breeds fragmentation and vendor dependency. Buzz ships under an Apache-2.0 licence. Teams can run their own instance with full control over data and agents, or use Block's hosted version. The open, self-hosted pitch should land with European firms wary of US vendor lock-in and of data leaving their control. It also chimes with the drive to give autonomous agents their own standing as they take on real work. A crowded room Buzz is still early. The Git integration is nascent. And Block is entering a field where Slack, Microsoft Teams, and OpenAI all race to deploy agents in the workplace. Whether openness beats the incumbents' reach is the open question. So is oversight: handing agents their own identities and permissions is convenient, and it is exactly the autonomy that safety researchers keep warning about.

Jack Dorsey wants to take on Slack and GitHub with new Buzz platform bringing humans and agents together

* Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square, launches collaboration app Buzz * Buzz is an open platform for humans and AI agents to interact and work * The app welcomes AI agents from any provider, including Anthropic and OpenAI Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has launched a new, free collaboration app designed as a shared space for humans and AI agents to collaborate within the same channels and conversations. Launched under the Block brand (parent company of popular POS app Square), the Buzz app being positioned as a modern and comprehensive alternative to Slack and GitHub. On the app, agents will have their own profiles, cryptographic identities, channel memberships and permissions, giving them near-human-like capabilities to review or propose code, complete tasks, create channels and coordinate other agents. Jack Dorsey's Buzz app is a human-AI collaboration space Importantly, Buzz is set to be an open space that allows connections to any model, including Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and Block's own open-source framework. "Every company is going to need a place where humans and agents work together," said Block Head of AI Capabilities Bradley Axen said. From launch, desktop apps for macOS, Windows and Linux are available for Buzz, which is built on Nostr, a "free and open-source protocol for social media and other things" per Nostr's own terminology. That means a decentralized alternative to the likes of Slack, though those Nostr underpinnings do mean a Buzz identity can theoretically travel across other Nostr-compatible systems. On the privacy front, messages and media on Block-hosted relays aren't end-to-end encrypted, and agent providers like Anthropic and OpenAI may also receive prompts and related channel content. However, organizations can choose to self-host if they need additional security measures. While Buzz isn't alone in looking to tap in on agentic communications - Slack sees itself as an agentic operating system through which AI agents can collaborate and coordinate, too - Dorsey's app tries to take this one step further by being a team chat, project context, agent orchestration and code hosting place all under one roof. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.

Jack Dorsey's Block Launches Buzz, a Nostr-Based Slack and GitHub Rival for AI Agents

Buzz is model-agnostic, supporting agents built on Claude Code, Codex, and Block's own goose. Jack Dorsey's Block has launched Buzz, a free, open source platform where employees and AI agents work side by side in a shared workspace, the company said Tuesday. "we're launching BUZZ," Dorsey tweeted, describing "a new groupchat platform for teams of people and agents of all sizes" built to reduce the company's dependency on Slack and GitHub. He called it "model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source." Buzz bundles channels, threads, direct messages, voice, media sharing, code repositories, and automated workflows into a single interface that Block said will feel familiar to anyone who has used a modern team chat tool. Agents with identities Agents in Buzz hold their own cryptographic identities and defined permissions, and can post, review code, run approved automations, and contribute to conversations alongside people. Multiple humans and multiple agents share one workspace and build on each other's work. "Every company is going to need a place where humans and agents work together," Bradley Axen, Block's head of AI capabilities, said in a statement. "The question is whether that place is proprietary or open." Buzz is model-agnostic and agent-agnostic, with teams able to deploy agents powered by any LLM or harness -- including Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex, and goose, the open source agent framework Block first released in January 2025. Why Nostr Block chose Nostr to solve what it calls the "most fundamental problem" in multi-agent work, that of identity. Every participant, human or agent, holds a keypair that belongs to them rather than to the platform, so an agent's identity, history, and reputation can travel across any Nostr-compatible system. Each message, reaction, workflow step, review approval, and git event is recorded as a single signed event in one log, according to the project's repository, which describes a hash-chain audit trail that applies whether the author is a person or a process. The code is published under an Apache 2.0 license at github.com/block/buzz, and teams can self-host or use Block's managed version. It remains early, shipping as version 0.4.21 with desktop builds for macOS, Windows, and Linux and mobile clients still unfinished. And despite the "decentralized" framing, each workspace runs on a single relay, which the project's repository calls its "single source of truth." Rethinking the operating model Block employees have been considering how teams should work once the tool no longer dictates the process. Lucas Isaza, who works on AI and product at Block, argued in a thread that tools such as Asana, Jira, and Linear once baked sprints and Kanban into company rituals, shaping the operating model as much as the work. A configurable workspace removes those constraints, he said, so "the bottleneck becomes the operating model." In Buzz, he wrote, a single thread can hold the diagnosis, task, fix, and surrounding conversation, condensing what used to span several tools into one record of why a decision was made. Agents can take user-level actions through CLI commands, create their own channels, and update their own memories, while users set channel- or thread-specific rules for each agent. Isaza said he had experimented with agents that generate a shared whiteboard for every thread, producing "better context handoffs with no additional work." Block has tested the approach internally for months and has "yet to figure out" the model that gets the most from Buzz, he added, noting that most work is collaborative and "that doesn't need to stop with AI." Indeed, Block built the Buzz platform itself using agents, according to Thomas Petersen, a principal designer and AI strategist at the company. Petersen said he rejoined Block wanting to change "the lonely experience of working with AI agents," adding that "the entire platform" was developed using agents, including its interface, which he described as "more sculpted over time than designed up front." A protocol streak Buzz extends the open protocol push that has defined Dorsey's work since he left Twitter. He stepped away from the Bluesky board in 2024 and has since backed a string of tools no single company controls, most of them built on Nostr, the relay-based protocol he has personally funded. That includes Bitchat, his Bluetooth mesh messenger, which China ordered pulled from Apple's App Store in April, echoing Beijing's 2023 ban on the Nostr-based Twitter alternative Damus. He has also seeded andOtherStuff, a nonprofit for open source social tools. Block cut more than 4,000 jobs in February, roughly 40% of staff, with Dorsey noting at the time that AI "fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company." A month later, Dorsey announced that the firm's Cash App would build support for stablecoins into its core payment flow, though the Bitcoin maximalist was vocal about his reluctance to do so. In April, the firm disclosed holdings of 28,355 BTC worth $2.2 billion in its proof-of-reserves report.

Block launches Buzz, an open-source workspace for humans and AI agents

Financial services company Block Inc. today launched Buzz, a free open-source workspace built for teams of humans and AI agents. The agents are full members with their own accounts, not chatbots answering prompts. Buzz combines team chat with code hosting and automated workflows, and Block is going after companies that now run their work across Slack and GitHub. The new offering has the usual features of a chat app: channels, threads, direct messages and voice. The novelty is in the agents. Each one joins the workspace as a member with its own permissions and can post messages, review code, kick off automations and take part in conversations much as a colleague would. The design rests on identity. Buzz is built on Nostr, the decentralized messaging protocol, which gives every agent a cryptographic keypair independent of the platform. A second signature ties that agent back to its human owner, creating what amounts to a verifiable passport and an audit trail for everything the agent does. Block describes the result as a cryptographic paper trail that neither the human nor the agent could produce alone. The platform is agent and model agnostic. It works with Anthropic PBC's Claude Code, OpenAI Group PBC's Codex and Block's own goose framework through the Agent Client Protocol, an open standard for wiring coding agents into developer tools. Teams can run their own Nostr relay or use Block's hosted option, currently free in beta. Git hosting is baked in through a built-in software forge. Feature branches become channels, and patches, continuous-integration results and review comments are preserved in a single record alongside the discussion that produced them. Buzz extends a broader open-source push at Block. The company released goose, its open framework for AI agents, in early 2025 and in December joined the Linux Foundation's new Agentic AI Foundation alongside Anthropic and OpenAI. Block Chief Executive Jack Dorsey has argued in the past that AI should change how organizations coordinate rather than serve as a bolt-on productivity tool. "Every company is going to need a place where humans and agents work together," said Bradley Axen, head of AI capabilities at Block, in the announcement. "The question is whether that place is proprietary or open." The software is early. Block shipped version 0.4.22 at launch; desktop apps are available for macOS, Windows and Linux, and mobile clients and workflow approval gates remain unfinished. The company has not disclosed pricing for its hosted service or published adoption figures beyond its own use. Buzz is available now at buzz.xyz under an Apache 2.0 license, with source code on GitHub.

Dorsey's Block Turns AI Agents Into Real Employees | PYMNTS.com

The launch answers a question most workplace software has not caught up with: where do digital workers sit once a company hires them? Most chat tools treat AI as an add-on that borrows a human's account. Buzz gives each agent its own membership, complete with its own account, cryptographic keys and permissions built on the open Nostr protocol. That lets it post messages, review code and kick off routine tasks the way a colleague would, SiliconANGLE reported. "Every company is going to need a place where humans and agents work together," said Bradley Axen, Block's head of AI capabilities said in the announcement. How Buzz Actually Works Buzz folds the tools most teams spread across separate products into one place. It combines channels, threads, direct messages, voice, media sharing, code storage and automated workflows, Crypto Briefing reported. The layout, Block said, will feel familiar to anyone who has used a modern team chat tool. Under the hood, though, the platform is not tied to any one AI provider. It works with agents built on Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex and Block's own goose system, Decrypt reported. That means a company can bring whichever AI it already uses. Block principal designer Thomas Petersen said the company built the entire platform using agents, including its interface. That flexibility does not come at the cost of oversight. For executives, the practical payoff is accountability. Buzz logs every message, code change and task an agent completes under that agent's own identity. A manager can see exactly what a digital worker did, when it did it and which human is responsible for it. That answers the question boards keep asking about AI in operations: who did what. AI Agents Are Landing on the Org Chart Buzz is built for a shift already underway inside companies. PYMNTS reported, citing Harvard Business Review research that 31% of leaders surveyed say their companies frame AI as a teammate or employee, and nearly 1 in 4 say agents are formally listed on organizational charts. Those agents need somewhere to work, and the software that manages people and digital workers side by side is still being invented. The shift is picking up speed. PYMNTS Intelligence found in its report "Agentic AI Breaks Out of the Sandbox" that agentic AI adoption in the services sector jumped fivefold between August and November. It climbed from 4.3% to 25%, while adoption at technology firms tripled to 30.8%. Block Challenges Slack on Its Own Ground Block is not alone in seeing the opening. TechCrunch noted that Paradigm, a crypto-focused venture firm, has built Centaur, a rival platform. Its chief technology officer, Georgios Konstantopoulos, argued companies will want to run the software themselves for security while still reaching workers inside Slack. For newer startups without an established Slack presence, TechCrunch said, Buzz could be worth investigating. The outlet cautioned against moving an established team over while the product is in its early stages. Block's pitch against the incumbents is control. Companies can run Buzz on their own systems, keeping internal conversations and code off Block's servers entirely, or use Block's hosted version. The software is free and open source, meaning anyone can inspect or modify it. The product is early. SiliconANGLE reported that mobile apps and approval controls for agent workflows remain unfinished. Block has not disclosed pricing for the hosted service. For all PYMNTS AI and digital transformation coverage, subscribe to the daily AI and Digital Transformation Newsletters.