Build organizations, not just agents.
The open-source substrate for AI organizations that run themselves — accountably. You set the mission and the guardrails. Your agents do the work.
Autonomy is earned, not assumed.
Most “autonomous company” demos hand a swarm of agents the keys — and hope for the best.
OpenMAO takes the opposite bet.
Every action an agent takes is owned, governed, and auditable. The system widens what agents can do only on a track record it can prove. Accountability isn't the brake on autonomy — it's the road to it.
The loop is the product.
OpenMAO isn't a pile of features. It's one loop — and each turn, proven in the audit trail, earns the next notch of autonomy.
Govern
Every action bounded, owned, non-bypassable.
Remember
One agent's lesson becomes the organization's.
Self-correct
Outcomes turn into better decisions.
Self-learn
The org improves its own roles, policies, workflows.
Earn autonomy
The audited record widens the dial a notch. Always reversible.
Anyone can ship one stage. Almost no one will build the whole loop. That loop is the hard, valuable thing — and the reason OpenMAO exists.
Bring your own agents. OpenMAO owns the record.
Your agents, frameworks, and tools are workers on top. OpenMAO is the system of record. Anything that can send, spend, deploy, write, or change something routes back through OpenMAO first.
work items · owners · policies · approvals · memory · events · world model
The agent can't reach the side effect without passing the gate. Swap your framework tomorrow — the organization, its memory, and its audit trail are untouched.
Autonomy is a dial, not a switch.
OpenMAO starts tight and widens only on earned, audited trust.
Early, open, and honest about it.
OpenMAO is an early local release. Governance, memory, and audit are real and tested. The hard part — genuine self-correction, where an organization diagnoses its own failures and revises its own structure — is the open frontier: specced, seamed into the architecture, and not yet built.
If that problem pulls at you, this is a good place to be.
What we hold to.
Accountability before autonomy
Build audit, enforcement, and reversibility before widening the dial.
Enforcement, not etiquette
Real side effects are governed only when the perimeter is non-bypassable.
Integrate, do not fuse
Frameworks and models are interchangeable workers under OpenMAO authority.
The organization owns its asset
Memory, structure, and audit history stay portable and self-hostable.
What OpenMAO is not.
- Just a governance or audit control plane
- Another agent orchestration framework
- A replacement for Jira, Linear, Notion, or Slack
- A system that grants autonomy it has not earned
- A hosted, vendor-locked product
- An uncontrolled swarm of free-acting agents
Self-correction is the open problem. We treat it as the research frontier, not a switch to flip.
The organization you build belongs to you. Not a vendor. Not a cloud.