Paperclip AI — treat agents as employees of a virtual company. treat agents as employees of a virtual company.

An open-source Node.js platform for running autonomous AI companies. Agents act as employees, each with a role, reporting line, budget and cost monitor. Companies are versioned, portable, and isolated within a single deployment.

Agent-agnostic — works with any agent that accepts a heartbeat (Claude, OpenClaw, Codex, etc.). Org charts, roles, reporting lines, per-agent cost budgets. Full ticket system with tool-call tracing and an immutable audit log. Goal ancestry — every task carries its company / project context. Heartbeat scheduler activates agents on cron; approval gates and config rollback included; mobile-ready dashboard; portable company templates with secret scrubbing for export / import.

Hard parts. Atomic task checkout (preventing two agents claiming the same work) — classic concurrency bug, easy to get wrong with LLMs. Budget enforcement and token accounting across heterogeneous models. Session persistence between heartbeats. Multi-tenant data isolation in a single deployment.