Is Claude Cowork open source? No. Kortix is the open-source alternative

No. Claude Cowork is Anthropic's closed, hosted product. Anthropic's help center is specific about it: Cowork runs your tasks on Anthropic's servers, in an isolated environment, and your sessions and files are saved to your Claude account. The instructions you set, the plugins you add, and the memory Claude carries between chat and tasks live in that account too. And the agent itself is Anthropic's: the code behind it is not published, so there is nothing you can read, fork, or audit, and there is no self-host option.

Kortix is the open-source alternative, and it starts from a different premise. Kortix is the open-source AI Operating System: your agents, their skills, your company memory, and every connector in one git repo you own, with the agents working on real cloud computers. The full source is public on GitHub (Kortix on GitHub), a repo that counted 20,000+ GitHub stars as of October 2026. You can read what an agent does before you hand it work.

What closed source means for a hosted agent

With Cowork, you buy access to a service. It is available on paid Claude plans only: Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise. Your standing instructions, the plugins you add, and the memory Cowork shares with chat are stored in your Claude account, alongside the sessions and files each task produces. For teams that want zero setup, that is a fair trade. The trade-off is verifiability and control: the code that does the work is closed, and there is no self-host option.

What open source buys a team

Open source means the code is published in a public repository anyone can read, copy, and run. For a team evaluating agents for real work, that buys four things:

• You own the configuration. Your agents, their skills, and your company memory are files in a git repo you own, versioned and diffable like any other code.
• You pick the models. Kortix works with any model provider with your own keys, so one vendor's model catalog does not decide what your agents can do.
• You choose where it runs. Run it on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on your own on-prem network. Self-host is free.
• No lock-in. The repo holding your agents, skills, and memory is yours. If you move, the whole setup moves with you.

Kortix: the open-source alternative

Kortix does the same job Cowork does: hand an agent real work and get finished output back. What differs is what you hold. Each session runs an agent in an isolated sandbox, on its own branch. When the work is ready, the agent opens a change request. You review it and merge it to the default branch. Every step of that loop is code you can read.

Compare the two products row by row in the full comparison, or see how to self-host Kortix on infrastructure you control. For the longer head-to-head, read the comparison on the Kortix blog.