Jack Dorsey's Spiral Expands from Bitcoin into Agentic AI

Jack Dorsey's Spiral — Block's Bitcoin open-source development division — has expanded into agentic AI by hiring the core team behind Block's Goose AI agent framework. The goal is to turn Goose into a larger open-source platform for building autonomous AI agents . This marks a direct pivot from Spiral's original Bitcoin-only focus (where it developed the Bitcoin Development Kit and other protocol tooling) into the AI agent space .

Absorption of Goose and the New Projects

Spiral brought in the core team behind Block's Goose AI framework, which was originally launched by Block in early 2025 as a local-first, open-source AI agent for engineering tasks (desktop, CLI, and API, working with 25+ LLM providers) . Spiral inherits the project to develop it further as a neutral, community-governed platform .

New projects under Spiral / Block's AI umbrella include:

• GDK (Goose Development Kit) — an SDK for building custom agent capabilities on top of Goose, following the pattern of Spiral's Bitcoin Development Kit (BDK) .
• Mesh LLM — a decentralized peer-to-peer inference project developed by Block employee Michael Neale, introduced by Dorsey in April 2026. It lets users pool idle GPU power to run open-weight models like Qwen, DeepSeek, and Llama, uses the MIT license, and offers an OpenAI-compatible API .
• AI protocol standards — Goose now anchors the agentic stack at the Agentic AI Foundation alongside Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) and OpenAI's AGENTS.md, forming a suite of open standards for agent-to-tool, agent-to-agent, and agent-to-data communication .

Goose's Donation to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation

Timeline:

• December 9, 2025 — The Linux Foundation announced the formation of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a directed fund co-founded by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, with support from Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare, and Bloomberg. At launch, three cornerstone projects were contributed: Anthropic's MCP, Block's Goose, and OpenAI's AGENTS.md .
• April 7, 2026 — Block formally donated Goose to the AAIF. The GitHub repository moved from block/goose to the aaif-goose GitHub organization, and the project's documentation migrated to goose-docs.ai .
• The donation is under an Apache 2.0 license, ensuring Goose remains open-source with neutral, multi-stakeholder governance .

Structure: AAIF is a directed fund under the Linux Foundation. Goose sits alongside MCP (Anthropic) and AGENTS.md (OpenAI) as one of the three founding technical projects. As of June 2026, Goose had over 48,000 GitHub stars .

Broader Context: Dorsey's Open-Source Investments via Start Small

Dorsey's personal philanthropic LLC, Start Small, has been the primary vehicle for his open-source and Bitcoin investments.

• Start Small assets: As of January 2026, Start Small held approximately $1.64 billion in assets (up from the original $1 billion commitment, counting past giving plus remaining assets) .
• OpenSats funding: Dorsey has made at least $31 million in total contributions to OpenSats, the nonprofit supporting Bitcoin and open-source developers. This includes a $10 million grant in 2023 and a $21 million grant in May 2024 . The $21 million grant specifically allocated $15 million to the General Fund for Bitcoin-related projects, $5 million to the Nostr Fund, and $1 million to operations .

Key uncertainty: While the $31 million figure for OpenSats is well-supported by multiple sources (cumulative $10M + $21M), the specific dollar amount of EleutherAI funding from Start Small is not directly confirmed in the search results.