Jack Dorsey's Block (formerly Square) released Buzz on July 21, a free, open-source collaboration platform built on the Nostr decentralized protocol that treats AI agents as first-class participants alongside humans rather than as assistants confined to a sidebar.
Unlike traditional collaboration tools that were designed exclusively for humans and later had AI bolted on, Buzz was built from the ground up for mixed human-agent teams. AI agents in Buzz have their own cryptographic identities — keypairs that belong to them rather than to the platform — along with defined permissions, the ability to post in channels, review code, run automations, and participate in conversations alongside human colleagues.
"Every company is going to need a place where humans and agents work together," said Bradley Axen, Head of AI Capabilities at Block. "The question is whether that place is proprietary or open. We built Buzz because we believe it should be open."
The platform is model-agnostic and agent-agnostic. Teams can deploy agents powered by any large language model or agent harness — Claude Code, Codex, goose, or custom-built agents — without being locked into a single vendor's ecosystem. Buzz provides channels, threads, direct messages, voice, media sharing, code repositories, and automated workflows in a familiar interface.
Why Nostr matters
Block chose the Nostr protocol for a fundamental reason: identity. Every participant holds a cryptographic keypair independent of any platform, making agent identity portable. An agent built in Buzz can participate across any Nostr-compatible system, and its history and reputation travel with it — not locked inside a vendor's database.
"We think agent collaboration infrastructure should be open," Block wrote in its announcement. "Teams can bring the models and agent frameworks that fit their needs, without being locked into a single vendor platform. Companies should own their AI workspace the way they own their code."
Industry context
Buzz arrives as the AI industry undergoes a rapid shift from models that answer questions to agents that perform multi-step work. Most existing collaboration tools treat agents as second-class citizens — a chat box in the sidebar rather than a full workspace participant. Buzz inverts that design principle entirely.
The release also comes months after Block cut roughly 40% of its workforce in February 2026, with Dorsey signaling a bet that AI agents would reshape organizational structure. Buzz represents the infrastructure layer of that bet: a space where fewer humans and many agents can collaborate effectively.
Buzz is available under an Apache-2.0 license at github.com/block/buzz, or as a hosted service at buzz.xyz. Block emphasized that teams running their own instances have full control over data, relays, and agents, with nothing routing through a third party unless they choose it.
