Jack Dorsey Built a Slack Where the Agents Carry Passports
Block launched Buzz on July 21 and the pitch sounds like a joke until you look at what it actually solves. It is team chat plus AI agents plus Git hosting in one workspace. Channels, threads, DMs, voice, media, code repos, automated workflows. So: Slack and GitHub, merged, free, open source, Apache-2.0, at buzz.xyz with source at github.com/block/buzz.
The merged-Slack-and-GitHub thing is not the point. The point is identity. In Buzz an agent is a participant, not a plugin. It gets a cryptographic identity of its own, its own defined permissions, and it posts, reviews code, joins threads and runs authorized automations as itself. Block's line on this is that agent identity is not tied to a platform account or a vendor-managed API key. It is portable, verifiable and independent. The whole thing runs on signed Nostr events, which is how you get that property without a central account system underneath.
Compare that to how every team is doing this today. You install an agent into Slack as a bot, it acts through one shared workspace token, and when three agents from three vendors all post as the same integration nobody can audit who did what. The seat model has no answer for a coworker that is a process. Buzz's bet is that once agents outnumber humans in a workspace, per-agent identity and per-agent permissions stop being nice-to-have and become the only way to run the room.
It is model-agnostic on purpose: Claude, Codex, Block's own Goose, or something you wrote. And it is self-hostable, meaning your data, your relays and your agents with nothing routed through a third party, or you take Block's managed hosting with the same protocol guarantees. Dorsey has been pushing decentralized protocols for years and this is the first time that bet has an obvious commercial reason to exist, because agent identity is a problem the platform account model genuinely cannot solve.
Whether teams actually leave Slack is a different question, and the honest answer is probably not soon. But the design question Buzz is asking is the right one. Everyone else is retrofitting agents into software built for people with email addresses. This is a workspace where the agent was a first-class member from line one.
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The merged-Slack-and-GitHub thing is not the point. The point is identity. In Buzz an agent is a participant, not a plugin. It gets a cryptographic identity of its own, its own defined permissions, and it posts, reviews code, joins threads and runs authorized automations as itself. Block's line on this is that agent identity is not tied to a platform account or a vendor-managed API key. It is portable, verifiable and independent. The whole thing runs on signed Nostr events, which is how you get that property without a central account system underneath.
Compare that to how every team is doing this today. You install an agent into Slack as a bot, it acts through one shared workspace token, and when three agents from three vendors all post as the same integration nobody can audit who did what. The seat model has no answer for a coworker that is a process. Buzz's bet is that once agents outnumber humans in a workspace, per-agent identity and per-agent permissions stop being nice-to-have and become the only way to run the room.
It is model-agnostic on purpose: Claude, Codex, Block's own Goose, or something you wrote. And it is self-hostable, meaning your data, your relays and your agents with nothing routed through a third party, or you take Block's managed hosting with the same protocol guarantees. Dorsey has been pushing decentralized protocols for years and this is the first time that bet has an obvious commercial reason to exist, because agent identity is a problem the platform account model genuinely cannot solve.
Whether teams actually leave Slack is a different question, and the honest answer is probably not soon. But the design question Buzz is asking is the right one. Everyone else is retrofitting agents into software built for people with email addresses. This is a workspace where the agent was a first-class member from line one.
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