Block

Block reported second-quarter 2026 gross profit up 25 percent to $3.2 billion on revenue up only 10 percent, while net income fell 83 percent to $89 million under severance charges. Six months earlier the payments group behind Cash App and Square had cut roughly 4,000 people, about 40 percent of staff, in a reorganization built around AI. Jack Dorsey told analysts that Block had not chosen a pricing model for any of the AI products it ships, and Evercore ISI analysts noted the company is sequencing product quality, distribution and adoption first. No AI dollar has been billed to a customer: the gain is sitting in the cost structure.

What Block publishes is better documented than what it sells. It contributed goose to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, alongside MCP and AGENTS.md. Berd wrapped that runtime in a desktop application because Block's teams wanted one consistent environment around the harnesses they already had, goose, Claude Code and Codex. Buzz, announced by Tyler Longwell, puts humans and agents in the same signed channels, with multi-tenant isolation mechanized in TLA+ and authorization properties checked in Tamarin.

The measurements cut against the product story. Atish Patel found that none of twelve agent team compositions beat the equivalent solo agent on Terminal-Bench 2.1 for value, and that a 5.5x price spread bought 8.9 points of score. Teams only paid off over long horizons: 20 tasks of 44 at 71.5 percent, against 15 and 59.1 percent solo. Block ran those benchmarks on its own product.