What is Squad? AI teammates on a dedicated cloud computer, explained

Where it came from

On January 31, 2026, its founder posted “This is my Mission Control: A Squad of 10 autonomous @openclaw agents. Led by Jarvis (my main @openclaw agent). They create work on their own. They claim tasks on their own,” and the post drew 782,000 views. MissionControlHQ productized the pattern through the summer, and on launch day the rebranded Squad named its foil directly: “Squad is exactly like Grok Bot but without any limitations of Grok Bot.” The founder also credited xAI with the timing: “When Grok Bot got launched, they kinda validated and educated the market about AI teammates for us.” Squad began, in other words, as an OpenClaw user’s answer to a closed product, sold as a finished service.

What a teammate is

The unit is a named agent with a single job. Squad’s example roster: one pulls overdue invoices from Stripe and drafts reminders; one triages the inbox and escalates; one handles newsletters and client correspondence; one screens applicants. An “AI Chief of Staff” interviews you, designs the roster and writes each job down as a procedure you can edit. Teammates are unlimited on the one plan, and can be hired, renamed or retired. Each gets its own model, so a research teammate can run on a different provider than the one answering mail.

The operating layer is what they call a mission control: a shared board every agent and human reads and writes, an @-mention that “triggers the mentioned agent’s run,” scheduled jobs on a timetable and heartbeats that wake each teammate to check its work (created switched off), inbound email as a trigger, approvals (the homepage says “Anything that leaves the building waits for your yes”, while its FAQ says “Squad has no setting that forces approval. Teammates can send email directly.”), daily caps, and a ledger of every run with its model, trigger and cost. A read-only dashboard can be shared with a client, which tells you who else buys this: the testimonials on the homepage are full of agencies and consultants onboarding their own customers.

The computer underneath

Each squad gets “a dedicated cloud computer,” and Squad’s privacy policy says each customer workspace runs in “a separate virtual machine.” Within that one machine, teammates are separated by browser profile (“own logins and files, separate by default”) and by per-connection scopes on the 70-plus integrations (read-only, read and create, or full, held “no matter which agent calls”). The secret vault lives on that computer rather than in a shared database, and a teammate reads a secret at run time without posting it into a thread.

That is the same isolation unit as Grok Bot, one computer per account, refined with per-agent browser profiles and connection scopes. Squad’s own Grok Bot comparison leads with xAI’s “isolation is per user, not per Grok Bot” as the flaw and offers “per-agent boundaries” as the answer; the boundaries are profiles and scopes, not machines. The people you invite share the machine too: with others in a squad, its computer screen says “People who can message your teammates may be able to use the sites you sign in to here.” Whether that is enough depends on what your teammates hold, and it is the question to ask before a teammate gets the payroll login.

What Squad does not say about the computer is as notable as what it does. There is no hosting provider named, no region, no SLA (the terms say they “do not guarantee uninterrupted service”), and no security or status page. Its docs mention the computer restarting and a workspace being moved “to new infrastructure,” and the one backup they describe is yours to take: a JSON export of teammates, tasks, docs and run history that leaves out email, memory, skills and settings. On cancelling, the terms still say “your workspace and data” go on a deletion queue at once, while the refund page says you “keep full access until the end of your current billing period”; either way, export first. That is more than it published at launch, and still little to compare an architecture against.

Bring your own AI plan

This is the spine of the offer. Supported plans include ChatGPT (recommended), Claude and Claude Code, Gemini, SuperGrok, Copilot, Kimi, MiniMax, Z.ai, Qwen, OpenRouter, Cloudflare Workers AI and OpenCode, thirteen providers in its own count, and you can “stack several accounts of the same plan, and set fallbacks.” Requests go “directly to the AI model providers you connect,” and Squad says it never trains on your data. Their own all-in figure is “$199 to $299 a month all in”: the $99 fee plus the plan. The docs now say how the plans connect: ChatGPT through Codex’s device-code sign-in, Claude Code through a claude setup-token on the plan’s own limits, and a separate Claude route that Anthropic bills as Extra Usage at API prices. What the public pages still leave unaddressed is whether running unattended agents on a consumer plan sits inside those providers’ terms, which is worth asking before you build a business on it.

What it costs, and the small print

$99 a month flat for each squad, a seven-day money-back guarantee on the first payment, cancel from the dashboard. Add-ons: a real email inbox per teammate at $10 a month each, $9 a month for each person you invite, and research and scraping tools on credits (1,000 a month included, 5,000 for $5); a second squad is its own $99 subscription. Web, Telegram, Slack, Discord and email are the surfaces, with a Squad for Mac app since October 21, 2026; iOS is “soon.” Self-hosted or isolated deployments are “case by case.” The month-by-month comparison puts those numbers beside Grok Bot’s and beside running the same pattern yourself.

Where it sits

Three products pushed the “AI teammates” idea in four weeks: Grok Bot on August 11, OpenClaw 2.0’s own multi-agent and shared-session story on August 31, and Squad on September 3. Grok Bot sells a closed roster, with the model chosen for you, for xAI’s subscription from $30 a month; Squad sells an office of employees on your own plan, on a runtime it no longer names, and says little about the computer they run on; OpenClaw itself gives you the harness and most of the mission-control pieces to run the pattern on a computer of your own, board not included. Which of the three fits is mostly a question of whether you want to meet the computer.