Jack Dorsey announced Buzz, a free and open-source group chat platform built by his company Block, on July 21, 2026. The product is designed to compete with Slack and GitHub. Its key idea: human users and their AI agents, the automated software helpers that can do tasks on your behalf, share the same conversations rather than working through separate channels. (TechCrunch)

Dorsey described Buzz on X as "model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source." His X/Twitter profile bio calls it "an open-source workspace for humans and AI agents, on a relay you own." (TechCrunch)

The code is available on GitHub, and a free desktop app can be downloaded for macOS, Windows, and Linux. The product's website is at buzz.xyz. (TechCrunch)

The project is honest about where it stands. Buzz says it is in its "early stages" and is not yet ready for teams to fully switch from their current platforms. Think of it as a public preview rather than a finished product that could replace Slack on day one. (TechCrunch)

Block, the company behind Buzz, is best known for Square, Cash App, Afterpay, and Tidal. Buzz is a new direction for the company, which has mostly focused on payment and commerce tools. (TechCrunch)

Others are working on similar ideas. Georgios Konstantopoulos, the CTO of a company called Paradigm, recently unveiled Centaur, an open-source product described as a "virtual employee" that runs inside Slack or through a direct connection. Both projects share the same assumption: AI agents will be regular participants in team workflows, not just background tools you call up separately. (TechCrunch)

Some of Dorsey's described choices deserve explanation. "Model-agnostic" means the platform does not lock you into one AI provider, so a team could switch between different AI companies without changing tools. "Decentralized" and "self-sovereign," along with the phrase "a relay you own," suggest that message routing and data storage sit with the user or their organization rather than with a central company. A simple way to think about it: instead of relying on a service like Gmail to hold all your messages, you run your own equivalent and keep full control of your data. For teams who care about where their conversation data lives and who controls how long it is kept, those are meaningfully different promises from what Slack or Microsoft Teams offer today.

The open-source approach also matters. Because the code is publicly available on GitHub, security teams can inspect it before using it, infrastructure teams can host it themselves, and developers can add features through contributions rather than waiting for a company to build them. Whether that actually leads to a thriving ecosystem depends on how actively Block maintains the project and whether outside developers get involved.

Dorsey is aiming at two different product categories at once. Slack handles real-time team communication; GitHub handles code collaboration and, increasingly, project management. A single platform trying to cover both, while also making AI agents a core part of the chat rather than a add-on, is a broad ambition. The early-stages warning suggests Block knows there is a gap between the vision and what the product can do right now.

In my view, what is genuinely new here is not group chat, open-source tools, or AI agents in the workplace individually. It is the idea that all three should exist in the same conversation, with the user in control of the system. If that approach works, it could change more than which tools teams use. It could affect how teams set rules for what AI agents are allowed to do, track messages that agents send on their own, and keep control of their data in workflows that increasingly involve AI models no one fully understands.

The project is available now for anyone to try. Whether teams adopt it widely will depend on things Buzz has not yet shown: reliability at a large scale, a system for controlling who can access what, and the kind of connected ecosystem that took Slack years to build. The code is on GitHub, the desktop apps are free, and Dorsey has made the design choices clear. The rest is about whether they can deliver.