Block

Block is the payments group behind Cash App, Square and Afterpay, and it now runs two workstreams at once: shipping AI to customers and rebuilding how its own engineers work. The second one already shows in the accounts. In Q2 2026, gross profit rose 25% to $3.2bn while revenue rose only 10% to $6.62bn; net income fell 83% to $89m under severance charges from a reorganisation six months earlier that cut roughly 4,000 jobs, about 40% of headcount. Jack Dorsey told analysts the company has not decided how to price its AI tools. Payments Dive read the two facts together: nothing has been billed to customers, and the margin is already there in the cost structure.

The engineering output is unusually legible. goose, contributed to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) alongside MCP and AGENTS.md, is the open runtime; Berd is the desktop application over it; Buzz is the shared human-and-agent workspace on Nostr, with Buzz Projects adding a Git forge where the same key that signs messages signs pushes. Tyler Longwell states the thesis: the bottleneck moved from intelligence to coordination.

Block also publishes numbers against its own product. Atish Patel's Terminal-Bench 2.1 runs found no team composition beating the equivalent solo agent, and Claude Opus 5 at xhigh effort as the most expensive run at $140.63 for 75.0%. On Long-Horizon Terminal-Bench, a team finished 20 of 44 tasks against 15 solo. Whether that reverses on short tasks depends, Block says, on models being trained to collaborate.