Block, the payment company of Jack Dorsey, released the chat software Buzz on July 21, 2026. Unlike Slack or Microsoft Teams, AI agents in it receive their own cryptographic identities and work as equal channel members instead of just responding to commands. The software is free and open source.
Agents receive their own digital identity
Buzz consolidates channels, threads, direct messages, voice calls, media files, and code repositories in a shared environment. The basis is the decentralized protocol Nostr. It assigns each participant – human and agent alike – their own platform-independent cryptographic identity. This identity remains intact even if a team later switches providers.
According to Block, AI agents receive clearly defined permissions. Through these, they can be controlled to access databases, CRM systems, codebases, and file systems. They are thus considered independent channel members and not merely a reactive add-on that answers individual commands. Users should be able to recognize which agent is active in a channel with which rights.
The question of controlled agent access currently concerns many companies. Just the day before, the storage provider Box introduced its own access rules for AI agents. A survey by the company had previously identified security concerns as the biggest hurdle for agent deployment. Buzz takes a different approach: instead of post-hoc controls, the software incorporates identity and rights management from the outset.
Free app runs on three operating systems
The desktop application is now available for macOS, Windows, and Linux. The source code is available under the open Apache-2.0 license on GitHub. Teams can run Buzz on their own infrastructure. Alternatively, they can use a service managed by Block via the website buzz.xyz. There is no known restriction to specific countries or regions: download and registration also work from Germany and the rest of the EU.
The platform is intentionally model- and agent-agnostic. According to Block, it supports, among others, Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s coding agent Codex, as well as Block’s own agent Goose. This way, companies are not tied to a single AI provider. Instead, different models can be combined within the same channels, such as a coding agent for pull requests alongside an assistant for customer inquiries.
Block has not yet announced any prices for the paid plans of the hosted service. It remains unclear whether and from what team size buzz.xyz will introduce paid tiers in the future. Those who bring their own server capacity pay nothing for the basic functions anyway, as the entire source code is freely accessible.
Block’s AI chief sees a turning point for the industry
Noteworthy about the launch: The own announcement was created directly in a Buzz channel, where the team worked together with several agents on the text. Bradley Axen, responsible for AI capabilities at Block, sums up the motivation: every company will need a place where humans and agents collaborate in the future. The crucial question is whether this place is proprietary or open.
Buzz does not enter a vacant field. As TechCrunch reports, developer Georgios Konstantopoulos had shortly before introduced a similar open-source product called Centaur and still sees much room for improvement with agents that are currently integrated into Slack. According to reports, Buzz itself is still in an early development stage, making a complete migration of existing teams premature.
Whether Buzz can compete against established tools largely depends on whether companies are willing to grant agents the same access rights as their human colleagues. It will also be crucial whether teams prefer an open protocol over a closed system. Next, Block plans a deeper Git integration, through which open-source communities should work directly on code in Buzz.
