Block’s new Apache 2.0 agent workspace Berd works across models and harnesses, stores conversation history locally

Block, the technology company founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey that owns Square, Cash App and the music streaming service Tidal, is open-sourcing Berd, a desktop application it originally built to give its own employees a single environment for working with AI agents across different models, tools and projects.Berd is a locally installed graphical desktop application rather than a browser-based workspace. It is available now on GitHub under a permissive Apache 2.0 license — meaning anyone can use, modify and redistribute it, including commercially — with free downloadable builds for macOS, Windows and Linux. The repository reached version 0.6.2 on Aug. 18, its seventh public release, and lists 91 contributors.“Berd is desktop-first because much of its value comes from working directly with projects, local files, tools, repositories, and agents running on or connected to the user’s computer,” Brad Axen, Head of AI Capabilities at Block, told VentureBeat in emailed responses.A daily work surface for AI agentsBlock positions Berd as a “daily AI work surface”: a single place where users can start chats, attach files or folders, choose agents and models, work inside persistent projects, configure AI providers, manage skills and extensions, review session history and build automations.The design goal is not merely convenience. According to Berd’s product specification, users should always be able to tell which project, files, agent, model, provider and session state are actively shaping a conversation. That emphasis on visible operational state is what Block says separates Berd from a generic chatbot wrapper. Configuration — providers, extensions, skills, automations, projects — is treated as part of the workflow rather than buried in an administrative layer, and the interface is designed to expose failures, unavailable providers, and loading and streaming states plainly rather than smoothing them over with assistant-style friendliness.Berd grew out of a practical problem inside Block. Employees were already working with capable agents — Block’s own Goose, Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex — but the experience around them had become fragmented.“We had capable agents through goose, Claude Code, and Codex, but working across them meant navigating different interfaces, configuration systems, and ways of managing context,” Lucinda Bell, Technology Communications at Block, said in an email. Berd, she said, gives Block teams “one consistent desktop application across models and harnesses.”For enterprises, that layer may matter as much as another incremental gain in model capability. Persistent projects mean users can return to an established collection of files, instructions and agent configurations instead of reconstructing context for each task. Block also explicitly designed Berd to make agentic work accessible beyond engineering, letting people start with a conversation and add tools, context and structure as the work requires.Block is not positioning Berd as a mobile product. Axen said the company’s open source collaboration platform Buzz already provides a mobile experience and is Block’s preferred environment for work on the go.Block thinks agents should look different when they are differentBerd takes an unusual approach to a problem most enterprise AI products leave implicit: how users tell one configured agent apart from another.Instead of treating every agent as another blank chat window, Berd gives agents roles, instructions, skills, tools and recognizable visual identities. Block created collections of animated characters — its flagship designs are called “Gloopies” — and Berd’s public site showcases predefined personas such as Berdy, Pushback, Choosey, Copycat, Tinker and Wildcard, each built around a different style of work: Pushback plays devil’s advocate on drafts, Choosey helps narrow decisions, Copycat learns to write in the user’s style.The visual layer is not meant to substitute personality for substance. Block’s own formulation, from a company blog post on Berd’s design, is functional: “The avatars make the agent recognizable. Its role, skills, and tools make it useful.”That distinction could grow more important as workers juggle several specialized agents at once. A recognizable identity serves as visible shorthand for an otherwise invisible package of instructions, tools and permissions — agents appear on the workspace as distinct animated characters rather than identical entries in a chat list, so users can tell them apart before opening a conversation.The product specification guards against the characters turning Berd into a novelty. It describes the intended personality as “focused, capable, companionable,” while explicitly rejecting toy-like presentation, oversized decorative UI and interfaces that hide operational state behind friendliness.An orchestration layer, not another model or agent runtimeArchitecturally, Berd is neither a new foundation model nor a new agent runtime. The application is built with Tauri 2 and React 19 — frameworks for building lightweight desktop apps with web technologies — and communicates with Goose, the open source agent framework Block introduced in January 2025, through a standard called the Agent Client Protocol (ACP). Goose runs quietly alongside Berd as a bundled “sidecar” process and handles the underlying agent loop; Berd handles projects, sessions, context, agents and configuration on top.For readers unfamiliar with it, Goose is a model-agnostic agent framework and runtime, originally focused on software development workflows. It connects large language models to files, commands and outside systems — including through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for wiring AI systems to external tools and data — so agents can take actions rather than merely generate text. Goose works with proprietary model providers as well as locally run open models. Block has since contributed Goose to the Agentic AI Foundation, the Linux Foundation body it helped establish with Anthropic, OpenAI and others in December 2025, giving the framework a vendor-neutral home alongside MCP.Axen drew the boundary explicitly: agent harnesses such as Goose, Claude Code and Codex manage the loop between a model, its context and its tools, while Berd provides the consistent desktop environment around those harnesses. In the public release, users configure whichever providers and harnesses they want rather than inheriting a Block-selected model stack.The project’s README adds an operational detail that matters for anyone evaluating the software: Berd does not simply pull whatever Goose build happens to be current. Its build process pins a specific Goose backend version through a lockfile, verifies the cached binary matches that pinned version, and packages it with the app. Developers can explicitly substitute another Goose binary for local testing. For organizations inspecting Berd, that creates a defined version boundary between the desktop application and its default agent backend rather than letting the backend silently drift.How Berd compares to Codex, Claude Code, Cursor and GooseThat separation matters because the agent-tooling market is already converging on products that manage increasingly autonomous AI workers. OpenAI describes its Codex app as a “command center” for agents, with separate project threads and multiple agents operating in parallel. Claude Code, Anthropic’s agent for reading codebases, editing files and executing commands, now spans the terminal, IDEs and a desktop app. Cursor describes its latest release, Cursor 3, as a unified workspace for software development with agents, including handoffs between local and cloud agents and multi-repository workflows. And Goose itself remains available directly, as a free command-line tool and desktop app for technically comfortable users.Berd’s differentiation is therefore less about inventing the agent workspace than about making that workspace open source, multi-harness and potentially useful outside coding. Every other product in the table below is either tied to a single vendor’s models, priced as a subscription, or aimed squarely at developers — and in most cases all three.ProductMakerPricingModel supportDistinguishing featuresBerdBlockFree and open source (Apache 2.0); users pay only their own model provider costsAny provider the user configures, across multiple agent harnessesDesktop workspace over agent harnesses rather than a harness itself; local-first data storage; visual agent identities; persistent projects; enterprise custom distributions; designed for non-engineers as well as developersCodex appOpenAIIncluded with paid ChatGPT plans, from Plus at $20/month to Pro at $200/monthOpenAI models only“Command center” for coding agents; multiple agents running in parallel across separate project threads; cloud and local executionClaude CodeAnthropicIncluded with paid Claude plans, from Pro at $20/month to Max at $100–$200/month; also usage-based via APIAnthropic Claude models onlyDeep autonomous coding — reads codebases, edits files, runs commands; available in terminal, IDEs, desktop and web; usage caps have drawn developer criticismCursorAnyspherePro at $20/month; Ultra at $200/monthMultiple frontier modelsAI-native code editor; Cursor 3 adds a unified agent workspace with local-to-cloud agent handoffs and multi-repository workflows; developer-focusedGooseBlock / Agentic AI FoundationFree and open source (Apache 2.0); bring your own model, including free local modelsAny provider, or fully local models via tools like OllamaThe model-agnostic agent framework and runtime underneath Berd; CLI and desktop versions; can run entirely offline with no data leaving the machinePortability is part of Block’s pitch. Axen said much of the underlying work in Berd is deliberately kept portable: folders, Git repositories, files and plain-text instructions remain accessible outside the application; skills are file-based; and Berd agents can be exported and shared between Berd users with their instructions and settings intact. He pointed to ACP and MCP as part of Block’s direction toward “clear, user-owned formats and open protocols wherever possible.” That does not make every piece of state interchangeable across every harness, but it makes portability an explicit architectural goal rather than a side effect of using local files.Local-first data, telemetry and enterprise distributionsBerd is designed around a local-first data model. Axen said conversation history is stored on the user’s device in the local Goose session database, while credentials live in the operating system keychain by default.That does not mean all AI processing happens locally. “Local-first does not mean that no data ever leaves the device,” Axen said. When a user asks a configured model to work on particular context, the relevant prompt and material are sent to that model’s provider — so the actual data path, and the contractual terms governing it, depend on which provider an organization chooses.Telemetry — the usage data software sends back to its maker — is disabled by default in official Berd distributions. If a user opts in, Block says it collects a random installation identifier and a limited set of predefined usage events, while excluding prompts, messages, files, source code, credentials, names, email addresses and IP addresses from the telemetry payload itself (Block and its service providers still process IP addresses for transmission, security and rate limiting). Users can switch telemetry off again in settings. Block cautions that third-party forks can modify or redirect the telemetry system, so enterprises evaluating a customized build need to review that build’s actual behavior rather than assume Block’s defaults carry over.The public repository builds a self-contained, general-purpose distribution that does not depend on private package registries or enterprise credentials — technical teams can build and evaluate it without access to Block’s infrastructure. But Block has also created what it calls “distribution seams”: defined points where organizations can overlay managed provider settings, private agents, runtime configuration, optional companion tools, their own update channels and their own signing and publishing infrastructure, all without adding private material to the public source tree.Block’s own deployment shows how an enterprise can put governance around that architecture. Axen said Block runs its managed distribution on approved devices using approved model-provider infrastructure, managed configuration and governed tool connections. “The application can remain open and inspectable, while an organization decides which models, tools, permissions, and policies are appropriate for its environment,” he said.One caveat: “enterprise distribution” should not be read as a complete enterprise management plane. The README does not describe capabilities such as single sign-on, centrally enforced administrator policies, organization-wide permission controls, data-retention rules or audit logs. It establishes that companies can customize and distribute Berd; it does not by itself explain how those installations are centrally governed after deployment. Berd should be understood as endpoint software installed on users’ computers, not a centrally hosted SaaS product.Pricing, models and a closed contribution modelBlock has not announced a subscription price for Berd, and there is no indication one is coming. That does not make agent usage costless: organizations still pay whatever model, API or provider charges they incur. The economic pitch on Berd’s site is flexibility — users can match the model to the job rather than paying for an expensive frontier model on every task. As the site puts it: “Some tasks need the big brain. Most don’t.”Neither Block’s announcement nor the README provides a definitive matrix of supported model providers or recommends particular models. Internally, Block does not treat any one model as a permanent default: Axen said the company’s managed distribution exposes employees to “a curated mix of frontier and open-weight models,” with the catalog changing as models improve. “The best choice depends on the work,” he said.There is also a governance distinction developers should note. Although Berd’s source is public and Block solicits issues and feedback, the repository does not accept outside pull requests — external code contributions are automatically closed. The README says Berd is built by “a small team at Block” and directs outside participants toward well-formed, reproducible bug reports instead. Users are free to inspect, build and fork the code, but Block retains a tightly controlled upstream. For companies considering Berd as infrastructure rather than an experiment, that makes Block’s long-term maintenance and support plans worth clarifying.Block is not presenting Berd as a revenue product today. Axen said the first return on investment comes from Block’s own use of the software — making internal agent work more consistent while teaching the company how employees actually use agents — and that open-sourcing it adds leverage by letting outsiders inspect, adapt and give feedback on the architecture. A commercial layer around enterprise deployment may eventually follow. “Supporting organizations that want to deploy agents at work is an area of interest for us,” Axen said, adding that Block will share more when there is more to share.From private agent work to multiplayer workflowsBerd supplies the individual desktop experience; another Block project, Buzz, focuses on shared rooms where people and agents collaborate against a common, searchable record.Buzz is Block’s free, Apache 2.0-licensed collaboration workspace for humans and AI agents. Built on the decentralized Nostr protocol, it combines familiar team features — channels, threads, direct messages, voice and media sharing — with agents that hold their own cryptographic identities and defined permissions, and that can participate in conversations, code review and approved automated workflows. Unlike Berd’s local, single-user focus, Buzz is explicitly multiplayer, and can be self-hosted or used through Block-hosted infrastructure. It is likewise model- and harness-agnostic: teams can bring agents powered by Goose, Claude Code, Codex or others.Axen framed the split between the two products partly as a question of trust boundaries. “A local agent may have access to your filesystem and credentials,” he said. “An agent in a shared Buzz room has its own identity and access scoped through the relay.” Berd begins with one person and comparatively privileged access to that person’s machine; Buzz begins with multiple participants, explicit identities and shared-workspace permissions.The more consequential roadmap detail is that Block does not intend the two products to remain separate. “Going forward, our focus is Buzz, and we plan to bring the best parts of Berd’s single-player experience into it,” Axen said. Block wants work to begin privately and become collaborative without users switching tools or rebuilding context, with cross-device continuity — including mobile via Buzz — part of that ambition. In the meantime, Axen said, Berd remains available as an open source desktop application, but Buzz is the product Block encourages people to download and adapt.What enterprise adopters should take awayThe short version for IT and security teams: conversation history stays local by default; credentials use the operating system keychain; context sent to a model leaves the machine on whatever terms the configured provider offers; official telemetry is off by default and excludes prompts, files and source code; and organizations can package their own governed distribution — though central management tooling is not yet documented.The larger idea behind the release may matter more. Models and coding agents are becoming increasingly interchangeable components inside larger workflows. Berd is Block’s bet that the surrounding context — the projects, skills, tools, identities and persistent working environment — becomes the stable layer instead.