OpenBot: open-source AI coworkers that ask before they act
CopilotKit's OpenBot hit GitHub Trending this week, about 291 stars in a day, 11,500 total, MIT licensed: https://github.com/CopilotKit/OpenBot. Version 1.0 actually shipped Nov 9, with two patch releases since. The new part in this window is the attention, and it says something about what people want from agents right now.
The pitch is "AI coworkers" you host yourself. Each bot gets its own computer: a browser, files and tools. The tagline is the product: every action decided before it happens and recorded after. You can bring any agent that speaks AG-UI, CopilotKit's agent-to-frontend protocol. It runs as a desktop app on Mac and Windows with a Docker or Podman backend, or on Kubernetes through a Helm chart. The paid OpenBot for Business tier adds SSO, per-tool permissions, approvals and audit. Site: https://open.bot
Look at the release notes and you see the priorities. v1.0.2 gives Windows its own Podman machine, stops the upgrade installer from offering to delete your data, and adds a database migration named approval_reviewer_guidance. That's a team spending its time on the approval loop, not on making the bot more autonomous.
This is the same bet as OpenAI's Control Room kill switch: the winning agent product for companies isn't the one that does the most on its own, it's the one where a manager can see and veto each step. Open source plus self-hosting is CopilotKit's angle against the big labs' hosted versions. Whether people keep clicking approve after the hundredth request is the real test.
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The pitch is "AI coworkers" you host yourself. Each bot gets its own computer: a browser, files and tools. The tagline is the product: every action decided before it happens and recorded after. You can bring any agent that speaks AG-UI, CopilotKit's agent-to-frontend protocol. It runs as a desktop app on Mac and Windows with a Docker or Podman backend, or on Kubernetes through a Helm chart. The paid OpenBot for Business tier adds SSO, per-tool permissions, approvals and audit. Site: https://open.bot
Look at the release notes and you see the priorities. v1.0.2 gives Windows its own Podman machine, stops the upgrade installer from offering to delete your data, and adds a database migration named approval_reviewer_guidance. That's a team spending its time on the approval loop, not on making the bot more autonomous.
This is the same bet as OpenAI's Control Room kill switch: the winning agent product for companies isn't the one that does the most on its own, it's the one where a manager can see and veto each step. Open source plus self-hosting is CopilotKit's angle against the big labs' hosted versions. Whether people keep clicking approve after the hundredth request is the real test.
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