Goose grant program launch

Goose is Block's open-source AI agent, released January 2025 under Apache 2.0 and accumulating tens of thousands of GitHub stars by mid-2026. The codebase is primarily Rust with a TypeScript desktop frontend. Goose ships as a native desktop app for macOS, Linux, and Windows, a CLI for terminal workflows, and an embeddable API. Governance moved to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) at the Linux Foundation, with the canonical repo at github.com/block/goose.

The platform is model-agnostic: it integrates with 15 or more providers including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Ollama, OpenRouter, Azure, and Bedrock. When paired with Ollama or another local runtime, the entire agent loop, including model inference, can stay on the user's machine with no prompts or outputs leaving the host. Tool integration is built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard developed with Anthropic, and goose connects to more than 70 MCP extensions covering databases, code hosts, browsers, Snowflake, Databricks, Slack, and Google Drive.

The grant program launched June 2025 caps individual awards at $100K and is administered through Block's Open Source Program Office on a rolling basis. According to Block's announcement, the platform has reached thousands of community members and dozens of external code contributors, with adoption supported by partners including Databricks. Grants target external builders extending the platform, not internal development on goose itself.

The program sits at the agents, runtime, and protocols layers. The lock-in vector it pushes back on is the closed-agent stack where the model vendor also controls the tool runtime and the desktop client. Sibling efforts at the same layer include OpenInterpreter, AutoGen, and Smol agents, but goose is one of the few in the category backed by a public company under a permissive license and with a Linux Foundation governance structure.