Goose, released by Block, the fintech company behind Square and Cash App, in January 2025, runs as a CLI and desktop agent that goes past code suggestions into actually running shell commands, editing files, and executing multi-step workflows autonomously on a developer's own machine.
Its integration with the Model Context Protocol is unusually deep for how young the project is, with more than seventy documented extensions connecting Goose to external tools and data sources, one of the earliest and most extensive MCP integrations of any agent in this category. In December 2025, Block contributed Goose to the Linux Foundation's new Agentic AI Foundation, alongside Anthropic's MCP and OpenAI's AGENTS.md specification, moving it from single-company control to neutral, foundation-level governance.
Goose is free and open source under an Apache 2.0 license. For a developer who wants a genuinely open, locally run agent with deep MCP tool integration and governance that doesn't depend on one company's continued goodwill, Goose's Linux Foundation status is a specific, recent, and meaningful point of difference from venture-backed competitors.
