Block releases Buzz, an open workspace for humans and AI agents

Block has released Buzz, a free and open-source collaboration workspace intended to let employees and AI agents work in the same environment, with cryptographic identities attached to both. The move puts Block into the crowded market for developer and workplace tooling, where it is positioning Buzz as a more auditable, self-hostable alternative to Slack, GitHub and assorted glue-code systems.

The launch follows Block’s cuts of more than 4,000 jobs tied to AI, according to the company’s prior restructuring. Block has not disclosed customer adoption, usage numbers, a commercial model beyond free open source, or whether Buzz is meant to become a standalone business.

Buzz is built on Nostr, a decentralized protocol that uses public-key cryptography for identity. In Block’s framing, that means a company can run the tool itself, assign identities to humans and agents, and keep a clearer record of what each participant did. The company describes the product as “sovereign,” which in this context means self-hostable rather than dependent on a single vendor’s hosted service.

Block’s GitHub repository describes Buzz as an “AI-adjacent developer tool” and says agents inside the workspace can open repositories, submit patches, review code, run workflows, edit canvases, coordinate other agents, join voice huddles, create channels and bring in people who need to review work. The pitch is that agents should have many of the same collaboration surfaces as human teammates, while using different cryptographic keys and leaving an audit trail.

Block is selling openness in an agent tooling fight

Bradley Axen, Block’s head of AI capabilities, said in a statement that “every company is going to need a place where humans and agents work together,” adding that Block built Buzz because it believes that place should be open rather than proprietary.

That is the strategic claim, and it is still unproven. Companies can already connect software agents to collaboration and developer workflows, and the idea of assigning digital identities to agents is not unique to Buzz. Related efforts include OWASP’s Agent Name Service, DNS for AI Discovery and Estonia’s digital IDs for agents. Buzz’s use of key pairs for both people and bots may appeal to governance, compliance and security teams, but it does not by itself solve whether employees want agents operating in the same conversational spaces they use.

The challenge is practical as much as architectural. Humans and software agents work at different speeds, and chat systems can become unusable if bots generate too much activity. Git-based workflows were designed to absorb distributed code changes, reviews and merges. A shared text-based workspace for people and agents may need strict rate limits, separate channels or agent-to-agent areas to avoid burying human discussion.

Buzz also enters a market where incumbents have incentives to keep users inside their own systems. OpenAI sells closed AI services, while Anthropic has moved to prevent third-party tools from using Claude subscriptions, a reminder that platform openness tends to narrow when usage and revenue are involved.

The name also comes with baggage. Google used Buzz for a social product more than 15 years ago, before shutting it down and later pushing Google+, another failed social service.

Block’s developers say the bet is that one community can replace the current mix of chat, code forges, bots, CI dashboards, release tooling, search indexes and custom integrations with a common underlying system. That is an ambitious replacement pitch for a market already full of specialized tools and large vendors with agent strategies of their own.

This story draws on original reporting from The Register.