We are open-sourcing Agent Rita, a model-agnostic agent built to run inside the OpenBB Workspace and power agentic workflows on top of your own data and apps. Agent Rita gives you extra control and ownership because it ships as code you can inspect, host, and extend. It's released as open source under the MIT license, one of the most permissive licenses available, so teams are free to run it, fork it, and adapt it to their own stack without asking us for permission.
Rita can be used in the OpenBB Workspace the same way as the default OpenBB Copilot included in the Community tier, with one key difference. OpenBB Copilot is our opinionated agent, built on the models we think work best for finance analytics. Rita is the open, model-agnostic version that you can run locally, giving teams control over the agentic layer itself.
What Agent Rita is
Rita was designed as an analytics copilot that lives next to your dashboards, apps, and data connections in the OpenBB Workspace. Out of the box, it can:
- Find widgets across your dashboards and apps
- Fetch and parse widget data into artifacts (tables, charts)
- Run SQL on tabular data
- Create and edit dashboards and widgets
- Return answers with proper citations back to the underlying widgets and sources
- Suggest follow-up questions, and much more
For teams that want more, there is an optional MCP server in the same repo. It adds capabilities Agent Rita does not need to function, but that some workflows benefit from: web search, web-page fetch, Mermaid diagrams, code execution, and document RAG. You can add it when you want those extras, or run Rita on its own and keep the surface minimal. The OpenBB Workspace also supports MCP servers directly, so those same capabilities can be wired in through the Workspace interface, whether you use Rita, OpenBB Copilot, or any other agent you connect.
Note: With the release of Workspace MCP, you can also use Codex or Claude Code (or any other MCP-compatible agent) as external agents that work with the Workspace via MCP.
What you can build on top
Because Rita keeps the core small and pushes most capabilities into MCP servers, it is a strong base for teams who want to build an agent as part of their own infrastructure but are unsure where to start. Agent Rita is a good place to begin if you want to:
- Add your own MCP tools that talk to internal systems.
- Keep sensitive logic and data flows inside your Workspace deployment and LLM gateway.
- Evolve your model strategy over time without rewriting the harness.
Why we built it
The OpenBB Copilot works well when you are happy with the harness we designed and the model choices we make on your behalf. It is tuned to work well out of the box, with no setup on your side.
Some teams, however, want something different:
- They want to own the agent that runs inside their workspace
- They want to run their own AI agent inside their infrastructure to keep sensitive information inside their walled garden, particularly if paired with an open weight model running locally
- They already route models through an internal LLM gateway and want the agent to sit behind that gateway to fully own the connection to the providers
Until now, the way to do that was to build a custom agent from scratch (using our simple agents-for-openbb examples as building blocks) or use the OpenBB Copilot source-available option as an enterprise client. The first option still required more bespoke work to get to a mature, day-to-day agent, while the second one required a bigger investment commitment.
Rita shifts that starting point. Teams get a small, production-ready agent that already knows how to work inside the OpenBB Workspace: searching widgets, fetching data, running SQL, editing dashboards, and returning cited answers. From there, they decide which models to point it at, which LLM gateway to route through, and which MCP servers and custom tools to add on top. Rita is easier to fork, study, and adapt to the way each firm wants to run AI agents.
Agent Rita vs. OpenBB Copilot
Both agents run inside the OpenBB Workspace, but they serve different needs.
| OpenBB Copilot | Agent Rita |
|---|---|
| Cloud-hosted: available by default inside the OpenBB Workspace (Community Edition) or self-hosted: source code is available for enterprise clients who can run it themselves | Self-hosted: open source agent you can run locally and connect to the OpenBB Workspace (possible both with the Community and Pro Editions) |
| Tuned around our current selection of best-fit models | Model-agnostic: works with multiple providers or with your firm’s LLM gateway as the single endpoint |
| Built with Python and FastAPI | Built with Bun, TypeScript, Hono, and Vercel AI SDK |
| Best choice if you want it working out of the box with zero setup | Best choice if you want to own the agent layer as part of your infrastructure without building an OpenBB-compatible agent from scratch |
Get started with Agent Rita
You can find the open-source repository on GitHub.
Once you have Agent Rita running, you can connect it to the Workspace as a custom agent in the “AI agents” tab.
Rita is one piece of a larger picture where firms own their workspace, their workflows, and their agents. Open-sourcing it is another step toward that goal, supporting teams that want their agent to live on their stack.
A little behind-the-scenes story
This agent did not start as Rita. The first commits lived under a folder called copilot-experiment. The whole thing started as a weekend test to see if I could build a lean OpenBB agent on top of the Vercel AI SDK, with a small core and most capabilities pushed out to MCP servers. It worked better than I expected and the team realized there was real potential. We worked more on it and decided to open source it, so it needed a real name.
Around that time I was watching Paradise, the Hulu sci-fi series, with my soon-to-be wife, Rita. Without spoiling anything, the show has a storyline where a man names his creation after someone he loves. And that inspired me to do the same.
“Rita” turned out to fit nicely, and twice. Rita is the name of my partner, Rita Figueiredo, who is also the Marketing Lead here at OpenBB. Funny enough, our Head of Design, the person behind most of the interfaces across OpenBB, including the Workspace, is Rita Soares. So the name ended up honoring them both. Agent Rita is a small thank you to two people who quietly make OpenBB look, sound, and feel better.