goose

A general-purpose agent that runs on your machine rather than in someone else’s cloud: desktop app, CLI and API, with extensions built on Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol. Block donated it to the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation, announced in the project blog on 7 April 2026; the repository moved to aaif-goose/goose, and development continues.

Who built itgoose was built inside Block, the company Jack Dorsey founded that owns Square, Cash App, Afterpay and TIDAL: the repository was created in August 2024 and the agent was announced in January 2025. In April 2026 Block donated it to the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation, where it is one of three founding contributions alongside Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md, and the repository moved to the aaif-goose organisation. The project’s public posts are signed by maintainers — Adewale Abati on the launch, Michael Neale on the donation, Alex Hancock on the 2.0 architecture — and the repository counted 646 contributors.

1. 01

   A repository in August, an announcement in January

   The GitHub repository was created on 23 August 2024 and the first release, v0.9.0, followed on 10 September 2024. The project was announced publicly on 28 January 2025 in a blog post titled “Introducing codename goose” by Adewale Abati, and v1.0.0 shipped the same day. ZDNET covered the launch that day and described it as a total rewrite of the agent that had previously been available in beta.

2. 02

   The core is rewritten in Rust

   On 6 December 2024 the project previewed goose v1.0 Beta: the core had been rewritten in Rust, which the post says makes the build more portable and stable and removes the need for Python to be installed. The same preview added contextual memory, replaced the old toolkit system with Extensions described as modular daemons, and added a headless mode for servers and an Electron-based macOS GUI. The repository’s main language is Rust.

3. 03

   One agent, three clients

   v1.0.0 shipped as a desktop app for macOS, Linux and Windows, a CLI and an API. Its extensions are built on Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, and the official site calls goose one of its earliest adopters, listing 70+ documented extensions and 15+ model providers including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Ollama, OpenRouter, Azure and Bedrock, with support for using existing Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini subscriptions. A Hacker News thread on 30 January 2025 took 249 points and 68 comments; the launch announcement itself was submitted twice on 28 January 2025.

4. 04

   Donated to the Linux Foundation’s AAIF

   On 9 December 2025 the Linux Foundation announced the Agentic AI Foundation, with goose as one of three founding contributed projects alongside Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md. The aaif-goose GitHub organisation was created on 25 March 2026, and on 7 April 2026 Michael Neale announced in the project blog that Block had donated goose to the foundation, moving the repository and the documentation site to goose-docs.ai and noting that broken links, redirects and CI were still being worked through. The post states that goose is still open source, still actively developed and still the same agent; Block’s head of open source, Manik Surtani, said the foundation ensures agentic AI “remains shaped by the community and driven by merit”.

5. 05

   2.0 moves to ACP

   The 2.0 beta announcement of 8 April 2026 sets out why the architecture changed: the Rust CLI talked to the agent in process while the desktop app went through goosed, a custom REST and SSE server, so every new feature had to be wired up in both, and third-party developers had no standard way to connect. goose 2.0 adopts the Agent Client Protocol as the default interface. The published roadmap lists a stable ACP server as done, a TypeScript TUI beta and a desktop rewrite from Electron to Tauri as in progress, and the removal of goosed and the old Rust CLI as planned.

6. 06

   Still shipping

   The repository has 153 releases; the latest is v1.52.0 on 23 September 2026, and the last commit was on 25 September 2026, two days before the collection date. It showed 54,710 stars, 6,325 forks and 646 contributors, while the project site’s own banner said 45k+ stars and 500+ contributors. The old address block/goose still redirects to aaif-goose/goose, and the old documentation site returns 404 with a pointer to goose-docs.ai.