Open-source agents
Open-source agents and frameworks: public code you can read, run and modify, trading a vendor's convenience for transparency, portability and control. Much of the modern agent stack started here. These specimens are shown as reference cards, since their full entity pages are not built yet; each still traces to its public repository.
Public code you can read, run and change, on your terms
Forty open-source agents sit alongside the commercial catalogue, and they occupy different ground. Open projects lead on harnesses, frameworks and experimental topologies; commercial products lead on managed operation and vertical depth.
Show more
The traffic between the two runs mostly one way: patterns are proven in the open, then absorbed into managed platforms once they stabilise. Watching what the open projects are building is a reasonable forward indicator of what the commercial tier ships next.
What is an open-source AI agent?
An agent or agent framework whose code is public under a licence that lets you read, run and change it. You can host it on your own infrastructure and modify how it behaves, rather than consuming it as somebody else’s hosted product.
Are open-source AI agents free?
The code is; running it is not. You still pay for model calls to whichever provider you point it at, plus hosting and the engineering time to keep it working. For a small team that can easily cost more than a commercial seat.
Should I use an open-source agent or a commercial one?
Open source when you need to see inside the system, keep data on your own infrastructure or change the behaviour. Commercial when you want the operating work handled: hosting, upgrades, support and access control. Prototyping on open source and buying for production is a common route.
Can I self-host an AI agent?
Yes. Most open-source frameworks run on your own servers and can call either a hosted model API or a local open-weights model. Only the fully local setup keeps data entirely in-house, and it needs serious hardware to be usable.
What counts as open source?
A licence that permits use, modification and redistribution, as set out in the Open Source Definition (OSI). Several well-known agent projects and open-weights models ship under more restrictive terms, so read the licence before assuming commercial use is allowed.