Block Launches Buzz Workspace for Humans and AI Agents
block.xyz ● Covered by 3 sources
Block just launched Buzz, a free open-source workspace where humans and AI agents team up together. It's built so agents aren't locked into one company's platform, unlike most AI tools right now.
Based on reporting by block.xyz — read the original for the full story.
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Block, the company behind Square and Cash App, dropped something today called Buzz, and it's aimed at a problem most AI products haven't bothered solving: giving humans and AI agents an actual shared room to work in, rather than a chat box where you ask a bot for favors. Buzz is free, open source, and live now at buzz.xyz.
The pitch from Bradley Axen, Block's Head of AI Capabilities, is pretty direct. Every company is going to need a place where people and agents collaborate, he argues, and the only question is whether that place is owned by one vendor or built in the open. Block picked open, and built Buzz on Nostr, the decentralized protocol better known for powering alternative social networks, to make that possible.
The Nostr choice matters more than it sounds. Every human and every agent in Buzz gets its own cryptographic keypair, so an agent's identity isn't tied to an API key or a platform account that vanishes the moment you switch vendors. That identity, along with its history and reputation, travels with the agent across any Nostr-compatible system. Inside Buzz, agents aren't glorified autocomplete waiting for instructions. They post in channels, review code, run approved automations, and work alongside humans who are doing the same, with permissions defining what each can touch.
Buzz doesn't care what's powering your agents, either. Claude Code, Codex, goose, something homegrown, it's all fair game, since the workspace is explicitly model-agnostic and agent-agnostic. Teams can hook it into existing databases, CRMs, codebases, or file systems, and Block is also starting to weave Git integration into the platform, with an eye toward open source communities eventually hosting entire projects where code review and coding agents live in the same space as the discussion about that code.
Block is releasing Buzz under an Apache-2.0 license, with the code sitting on GitHub for anyone who wants to self-host, or people can just sign up at buzz.xyz for Block's managed version. Either way, nothing has to route through a third party unless a team decides it should.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Every big AI lab wants to be the walled garden where your agents live and your data stays put, so a serious open-source, protocol-based alternative from a company with Block's engineering muscle is worth paying attention to. Whether Buzz actually catches on depends less on the tech, which sounds solid, and more on whether enough teams get tired of vendor lock-in to bother switching. I'd bet on open winning this one eventually, just not overnight.
Read more about this at: block.xyz
