openai operator open source

Open-source Operator-style agents

Operator is gone, but the thing it demonstrated - tell an AI what you want, watch it drive a browser until it is done - is now better represented in open source than it ever was as a hosted preview. This page goes through the open repositories one by one: what each actually is, its license, and its scale as read from GitHub on 2026-09-03. The hosted-versus-open landscape, and what happened to Operator itself, are on OpenAI Operator alternatives and Is OpenAI Operator still available?; this page does not repeat them.

Disclosure first: this wiki belongs to AIHawk, one of the projects below. Star counts and descriptions were read from each repository this session, and the projects that are bigger, older, or broader than ours are described as exactly that.

What "Operator-style" means here

An Operator-style agent takes a goal in natural language, drives a real browser or desktop, looks at what came back, and decides the next action itself. That excludes plain automation frameworks (you write the steps) and excludes chat assistants that only summarize pages. Every entry below clears that bar or is included to clear up a naming collision.

The repositories

browser-use - the biggest, by far

github.com/browser-use/browser-use. Roughly 112k stars, MIT license, and the description reads "Make websites accessible for AI agents. Automate tasks online with ease." It drives a Chromium-family browser, supports OpenAI, Google and Anthropic models with your own keys plus its own optimized models through a unified key, and has an active commit history in the five figures. There is also a hosted cloud, which is out of scope for this page.

If you are new to the category, start here: the community, the examples, and the integrations are the largest in the field. The reasons someone eventually looks past it are real but narrower than its size, and they get their own page in browser-use alternatives.

Skyvern - vision-first browser workflows

github.com/Skyvern-AI/skyvern. About 23k stars, AGPL-3.0. Description: "Automate browser based workflows with AI". Its distinctive bet is using vision LLMs and computer vision to understand the page and map elements to actions, instead of depending on selectors that break when a layout changes. It runs on Playwright underneath and is actively developed. Note the license: AGPL-3.0 carries obligations MIT does not, which matters if you embed it in a product. A managed cloud exists with capabilities the open repository does not include.

Agent S3 - the whole desktop, not just the browser

github.com/simular-ai/Agent-S. About 12k stars, Apache-2.0, from Simular. Description: "Agent S: an open agentic framework that uses computers like a human". This is a computer-use agent: it operates the GUI of the machine, browser included but not only. The Agent S3 release (October 2025, with a TMLR 2026 paper) reports 72.6% on OSWorld, which the project describes as above the human baseline on that benchmark. If Operator appealed to you because it could do things, not only web things, this is the most capable open framework we verified.

The trade-off is the mirror of its breadth: a screenshot-driven desktop agent is heavier per action than a browser-native one, and reading the DOM versus reading pixels is a real architectural fork, not a detail.

AIHawk - ours, with the browser as the differentiator

github.com/feder-cr/AIHawk. About 30k stars, MIT (distributions before 2 September 2026 remain AGPL-3.0). The stars predate the current shape: the project began as a job-application bot and is becoming a general web agent, which its own description says plainly.

What makes it different in this list is not the agent loop, it is what the loop drives: a Firefox patched at the C++ level so the browser presents a normal desktop fingerprint rather than announcing itself as an automation build. It runs two ways: as an MCP server added to an assistant you already have (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor), or as its own local UI with an OpenRouter key, chat on the left and the live browser on the right. Python 3.11+, Windows and Linux only - no macOS, and that is a real gap next to every other entry here. A hardened browser is also not a promise of passage: what it cannot fix is documented as carefully as what it can.

The two projects both called "open operator"

The name collision costs people time, so here it is untangled.

browserbase/open-operator (~2k stars, MIT) was a template for building web agents with Stagehand on Browserbase, and its README called itself a proof of concept rather than a product. It was archived on 20 May 2026 and is read-only; the code moved into a demos repository. Do not adopt it expecting maintenance - its value today is as a worked example of the Stagehand/Browserbase stack.

All-Hands-AI/open-operator (~428 stars, MIT), from the OpenHands organization, is not an agent at all: its description is "Open-source resources on agents for computer use", a curated reference covering benchmarks and implementations. Useful reading, wrong shelf if you wanted software to run.

Reading the table honestly

Repo	Stars (2026-09-03)	License	Scope	Status
browser-use	~112k	MIT	Browser agent	Active
AIHawk	~30k	MIT	Browser agent	Active
Skyvern	~23k	AGPL-3.0	Browser workflows	Active
Agent-S	~12k	Apache-2.0	Desktop computer use	Active
browserbase/open-operator	~2k	MIT	Template	Archived 2026-05-20
All-Hands-AI/open-operator	~428	MIT	Resource list	Maintained

Two cautions about this table, because a table flattens things. Stars measure attention, not fitness for your task, and part of AIHawk's count is heritage from its job-bot era. And "active" was judged from commit and issue activity visible on the repo pages this session, which is a snapshot, not a guarantee.

How to pick from the open field

• Most examples, largest community, Chromium acceptable: browser-use.
• Layout-fragile workflows you want vision to absorb: Skyvern, minding the AGPL.
• Tasks that span desktop apps: Agent S3.
• Sites that inspect the browser, or you want the agent inside your existing MCP assistant: AIHawk, with our conflict of interest noted and the macOS gap admitted.
• You want to survey the space first: the All-Hands resource list, then come back.

Whatever you pick, run it against your real task before committing. Every project above is a pip install or a uvx away, which is the whole point of this list existing.

Short answers to the questions that lead here

Is there an open-source version of OpenAI Operator? Not a clone of the product, but several open agents do what it did: browser-use, Skyvern, Agent S3, and AIHawk are the ones this page verified.

Which open-source browser agent has the most stars? browser-use, at roughly 112k when read on 2026-09-03.

Is "open operator" a real project? Two are: an archived Browserbase template and an OpenHands resource list. Neither is a maintained agent product.

Do these need an OpenAI or Anthropic subscription? No. They take API keys (or, for AIHawk's MCP route, ride the assistant you already run). Model usage is pay-per-token to whichever provider you choose.

Are open agents as good as the hosted ones were? On desktop benchmarks the open field now leads: Agent S3 reports 72.6% on OSWorld where OpenAI's computer-use model reported 38.1%. Benchmarks are not your workload, but the direction is clear.

See also: OpenAI Operator alternatives for the hosted options next to these, browser-use alternatives for the leader's trade-offs in detail, and Choosing an AI browser agent for the decision framework above the level of any one repo.

Sources

• The browser-use, Skyvern, Agent-S, browserbase/open-operator, All-Hands-AI/open-operator and AIHawk repositories, all retrieved 2026-09-03; stars, licenses, descriptions and archive status as shown there that day.
• OpenAI computer use guide, surfaced via search 2026-09-03, for the 38.1% OSWorld figure quoted in the FAQ.

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Maintained alongside AIHawk, one of the repositories on this list. The star counts that beat ours are printed anyway, because a survey that hides the bigger projects is an ad, not a survey.