Stop treating AI like a digital intern you hide when the boss walks in. That’s the old way. The new way, unveiled Tuesday, treats artificial intelligence agents as full-fledged team members with cryptographic identities.
Enter Buzz.
Block (formerly Square, founded by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey) just launched this open-source workplace platform. You can find it at buzz.xyz. It looks like Slack at first glance. You have channels. Threads. Direct messages. Voice calls. Code repositories. Automated workflows. It’s the familiar digital office layout.
But the guts are different.
The open-source workplace platform Buzz offers doesn’t just bolt on a chatbot. It integrates AI agents into the team structure from the ground up.
These agents aren’t lurking in a sidebar. They have their own cryptographic keys. They have permissions. They post. They review code. They run automations. They argue, collaborate, and converse with human colleagues.
Bradley Axen, Block’s head of AI capabilities, put it bluntly in the announcement.
“Every company is going to need a place where Humans and agents work together,”
Axen continued, questioning the status quo.
“The question is whether that place is proprietary Or open. We built Buzz because We believe It should be open.”
Here is the friction point with current tools. Most AI integrations lock you into a vendor’s ecosystem. You rent your AI. You don’t own it. Buzz flips this.
It runs on Nostr.
Nostr is a decentralized protocol. It assigns cryptographic keypairs to every participant—human or machine. Your identity belongs to you, not the platform.
Matt Ross, Block’s head of investor relations, tested this out. He watched multiple agents collaborate on a project in real-time. The work produced was instantly available for his human team to pick up and build upon.
“This is going to completely transform How We work,” he posted on X.
Why does this matter to your bottom line?
Portability.
Because Buzz uses Nostr, an agent’s identity and history aren’t trapped in a walled garden. They can travel across other Nostr-compatible systems. You aren’t hostage to one vendor’s account system. If you leave Buzz, your AI history goes with you.
The platform is also model-agnostic.
You aren’t forced into Block’s specific AI tools. You can plug in agents built on:
- Claude Code
- Codex
- Block’s own goose framework
- Your own custom models
Block released Buzz under the Apache 2.0 license. This isn’t marketing fluff. It means developers can inspect the code, modify it, and self-host it without restrictions.
Need hosting but don’t want to manage the infrastructure? Block offers managed hosting through buzz.xyz. Pricing is still undisclosed.
Most businesses are tired of being locked in. They are looking for alternatives to proprietary silos. Buzz provides that infrastructure. It lets businesses own their AI setup. They can modify it. They can scale it. They can keep their data.
The shift is happening. Whether you’ll migrate from the giants like Slack and Microsoft Teams remains to be seen. But the architecture is there. The choice is open.
