Paperclip runs a team of AI agents like a company, putting tasks, budgets and approvals on one console
Synopsis
Paperclip released an open-source orchestration system for teams of AI agents, built as a Node.js server with a React UI, where users bring their own agents, assign goals, and track work and costs from one dashboard. It places org charts, budgets, governance, goal alignment and agent coordination beneath a task-manager interface, lets each agent use its own model and harness, and keeps tasks, skills, permissions and history in one place. The system is self-hosted with no Paperclip account required, initialized through an npm command, and can also run a test-drive instance preloaded with a CEO agent.
Interpretation
Paperclip orchestrates collaboration among multiple AI agents as if they formed a company: users bring their own agents, assign them business goals, and watch progress and spending from a single dashboard. It targets coordinating different agents such as OpenClaw, Codex, Claude and Cursor toward a common goal, rather than managing one agent or one pull request. The system ships as a Node.js server plus a React UI that looks like a task manager, with org charts, budgets, governance, goal alignment and agent coordination underneath.
Each agent can choose its own model and harness, while the team's tasks, skills, permissions and history are stored in one place. Agents from different sources no longer need separate records of tasks and permissions. The server is divided into identity and access, work and tasks, heartbeat execution, governance and approvals, org chart and agents, workspaces and runtime, plugins, budget and costs, routines and schedules, secrets and storage, activity and events, and company portability, with Claude Code, Codex, CLI agents and HTTP or web bots attached below.
Deployment is open source and self-hosted, with no Paperclip account required, and configuration and data persist locally after installation. Users can run their own instance without depending on a hosted account. With Node.js 24.11 or newer, npx paperclipai@latest onboard --yes initializes an instance and the CLI runs from npm's cache; test-drive starts an isolated foreground instance preloaded with a CEO agent that installs no service and creates no first task.
Perspective
The system targets teams that want to self-host, coordinate several heterogeneous agents and audit their work and costs; the material describes module composition, install commands and how to start a test instance, not post-deployment runtime behavior.
The material labels Agent Chat and the chat and email connectors as experimental, requiring the relevant instance settings to be enabled; beyond that it reports no runtime measurements or comparisons.