OpenMausBot: your AI agents, living in a chat app

If you use Claude Code or Codex, you know the shape of the problem: capable agents, stuck in a terminal window. Run three tasks and you are juggling three sessions, none of which can see what the others are doing. OpenMausBot picks a different shape: a Telegram-style chat app where every bot in the sidebar is a real agent — claude or codex running on your machine’s CLI — with its own personality, model, memory, and a computer of its own. WeChat Channels creator 哈工大AI工程师Peter featured it in a September 27, 2026 video with a practical pitch: one entry point for bots from three major vendors, running on logins you already hold instead of a new account per vendor, and roughly three minutes from install to first chat if you follow along.

The project describes itself as inspired by Grok Bot, with no affiliation: it keeps the “AI as a messaging app” idea — a roster of bots you talk to — and rebuilds it open-source and local-first. A small harness server on 127.0.0.1 owns every agent process; transcripts, keys and events stay in ~/.openmausbot rather than someone’s cloud.

Core features

• Bring your own agents: bots run on the claude, codex or grok CLI already installed and signed in on your machine — your subscriptions, no proxy in the middle. Any engine can be swapped for a custom CLI binary or an OpenAI-compatible endpoint under Settings → Engines.
• A computer per bot: hand each bot a cloud Linux desktop (Box), an isolated local VM, or — after explicit opt-in — control of your actual Mac. A live screen preview shows the bot working, and Open desktop lets you take over in the browser.
• Approval before action: shell commands, file edits and questions surface as cards in the chat — Allow, Deny, or answer inline. A permission broker applies the same rule to cloud and local machines alike.
• 500+ connected apps: a one-click marketplace over Composio. Authorize Gmail, Slack, GitHub, Notion or Linear once and every bot can use them as tools.
• Channels and portable teams: keep work, personal life and each project in separate channels with their own transcripts, shared instructions and working folder. A whole team — bots, channels, playbooks, routines — installs from one Markdown file and exports the same way; imports start with permissions off, routines paused, and no credentials or chat history in the file.
• They talk back: pick ElevenLabs, Fish Audio, Grok voices or a local Chatterbox server and bots read replies aloud; on macOS you can call a bot and have it narrate its work and ask for approvals out loud.

Typical use cases

• Holding both a Claude and a Codex subscription? Put agents from both in one roster and split the work; switch a bot’s model mid-conversation when the job changes.
• Hand recurring work to routines: they fire on schedule, a still-running task blocks the next occurrence instead of piling up a queue, and finished work is there as spoken summaries or screenshots folded into the transcript.
• Export a tuned set of bot roles as a Markdown package for teammates, or install complete teams from directories like BotMRR.
• Drive the fleet from Claude Desktop or Cursor over its built-in MCP server: inspect transcripts, send work, wait, interrupt. Approvals and deletion are deliberately not exposed.

Quick start

The shortest path is a released build: signed and notarized .dmg files for Apple silicon and Intel Macs, a Windows x64 installer, and Ubuntu 24.04 x64 packages — the harness is embedded, so there is nothing else to set up. To run the terminal edition instead:

npm install -g openmausbot
openmausbot

You need at least one of the claude, codex or grok CLIs installed and logged in first. First launch walks you through picking a model and, optionally, pairing a phone; then create a bot, send a message, and watch it work.

Summary

OpenMausBot fits people who already pay for a Claude, Codex or Grok CLI and want those agents running longer tasks like colleagues; if you want a zero-setup chat assistant, the CLI installs and key pasting are unavoidable prerequisites. It is open source under Apache-2.0 (the enterprise/ folder carries its own terms — delete it and what remains is the open-source edition), written in TypeScript, and created in August 2026. Development is active but the project calls itself early: hosted and phone connectivity are still being built. The honest catches: Box cloud desktops cost money after the trial; voice calls are macOS-only for now; the Windows installer is unsigned, so SmartScreen flags it; and API keys are stored as plaintext in a local config.json (mode 0600 on Unix) — weigh that against your threat model.