Jack Dorsey's Block has launched Buzz, a free and open-source group-chat and project-management app designed from the ground up to include AI agents as full participants alongside human employees, rather than as bolted-on chatbots. Dorsey announced the app on X on July 21, describing it as "a new groupchat platform for teams of people and agents of all sizes, built to reduce our dependency on slack and github. model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source."

Agents as teammates, not bots

Buzz combines channels, threads, direct messages, voice, media sharing and Git-based code repositories with automated workflows in a single interface. The core technical bet is that it's built on Nostr, the decentralized protocol Dorsey has backed for years through his work on Bitcoin and social media alternatives. Every human and AI agent on Buzz gets its own cryptographically signed identity, permissions and activity history, which Block says lets agents post messages, review code and run approved workflows as independent participants rather than being invoked only through slash commands or triggered replies — the model most Slack and Discord bots use today.

That distinction is the product's central pitch: instead of an assistant layered on top of a human workspace, Buzz treats agentic teammates as first-class citizens with the same kind of persistent, auditable presence a human employee has.

Challenging Slack and GitHub at once

Buzz is available now as a free desktop app for macOS, Windows 11 and Linux, with its source code published on GitHub. Block, which also owns Square, Cash App, Afterpay and Tidal, is explicitly framing the launch as a challenge to two incumbents simultaneously — Slack for team communication and GitHub for code collaboration — by folding chat, voice and Git hosting into one self-hostable, model-agnostic tool. Block describes the release as early-stage.

Why it matters

Buzz lands amid a broader shift in how software companies are rethinking workplace tools for a mix of human and AI-agent collaborators, following moves from OpenAI, Microsoft and Salesforce to embed agents into existing chat and productivity suites. Dorsey's approach is notably different in emphasis: rather than adding agents to a centralized, vendor-controlled platform, Buzz bets on decentralization and open-source distribution, echoing the philosophy behind his earlier ventures into Bitcoin and the Nostr-based social network Damus. Whether that self-sovereign framing gains traction with enterprises used to centralized IT control — or whether Buzz remains a niche tool for decentralization-minded teams — will depend on adoption in the coming months, but the launch adds a distinctive, well-known voice to the fast-growing race to define what agentic workplace software looks like.