OpenMuse: self-host a Muse-style personal agent (persistent browser/files/etc.)

CopilotKit has put out OpenMuse, an alpha personal-agent app you can run and build on yourself. The pitch is simple enough: give the agent a computer, a browser, files, and some persistence, then let it handle tasks while you watch what it’s doing inline.

In the demos, OpenMuse searches Hacker News and summarizes CopilotKit on iPhone, then on desktop it opens a school-trip email, checks the message, and looks up Monterey Bay Aquarium exhibits. The interface is very much part of the story here. Results for email and browsing appear inside the app, and the Take control button hands you the same browser session if you want to step in.

Under the hood, this is not just a chat box with a few plugins bolted on. OpenMuse runs a server, a task worker, and a browser worker. Its agent computer uses persistent Chromium and can also use an optional Linux workspace. It can browse public pages, run commands in its own container, work with files, and move PDFs between the computer and the app. Graphical desktops and autonomous checkout are still listed as future work.

The feature inventory is broad, but not everything is meant to be wired up the same way. Open-ended reasoning, live Google accounts, and CopilotKit Rich Threads need their own setup, and the docs separate what is working from what’s still on the roadmap. That roadmap includes health, bank, and social connectors, device push, voice, generated executable tools, and automatic reservations or payments.

There’s a lot of machinery here, but also a lot of guardrails. Google credentials stay encrypted at rest, file URLs and browser consoles use short-lived signatures, and stored review is still required before sends or calendar changes. For anyone who wants to poke at a personal agent without handing everything to a cloud service, that’s the real lure.