OpenWork Launches as Open-Source Competitor to Claude Cowork, Reaches 23,900 GitHub Stars

OpenWork, an open-source desktop application for autonomous AI agents, has gained significant developer traction with nearly 24,000 GitHub stars and a Y Combinator Spring 2026 acceptance, positioning itself as a free, model-agnostic alternative to Anthropic's proprietary Claude Cowork platform. Built by Different AI—a 4-person startup founded by Ben Shafii and CTO Omar McAdam—OpenWork enables AI agents to operate directly on local computer files using cloud or self-hosted models, with native support for existing skills, plugins, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers.