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Argus Council

Argus Council logo Argus Council logo

A council of LLM agents that plans, debates, votes and delivers, with you in the loop.

Argus Council is a self-hosted platform for autonomous multi-agent work. You give it a topic and a goal; a council of agents (a chair, researchers, analysts, coders, testers, writers, and overseers such as a monitor, a critic and a security officer) plans the work, executes it with tools and skills, votes on the result and delivers it as Markdown, HTML, LaTeX, PDF, DOCX, JSON or plain text. Every thought passes a thought bus before it is acted on: guardrails and overseer agents can annotate, hold or block it, risky tool calls wait for a human, and you can intercept and correct any agent, or the whole council, at any moment.

Current version: 0.1.4

0.1.4 gives agents a live, read-only browser behind an egress proxy, and you can watch each agent's browser in the run view. Skills a task calls for are loaded automatically and every use is traced. You sign CLI agents in from the app, with six more CLIs, and turn optional features on and off in Settings → Features. ACP is removed (it merged into A2A).

0.1.3 let a council's members talk to each other over A2A: they ask, delegate, review, broadcast and share a board, and your messages during a run stay in their instructions. The council now debates and co-signs its conclusion, with a secret devil's advocate only you can see, works truly in parallel (eight agents by default) with helpers it spawns as it goes, and reads a knowledge graph of what it already knows instead of raw text. A halted or stopped run resumes where it stopped, reusing finished work, and a budget reserve keeps it from halting at its budget. Auto mode lets agents run without stopping to ask. web_fetch, knowledge_read and artifact_read recover from common failures, and the protocol ledger records web requests and council exchanges. Home is a real home page, the Insights dashboard is rebuilt, and there are six colour palettes. Recent additions:

The full list is in the changelog.

What makes it different

  • Oversight on every thought

    Deterministic guardrails, a loop detector and overseer agents (security, monitor, critic) review each thought before it runs. They can annotate it, hold it for a rewrite with a correction, or block it, and you outrank all of them.

    Guardrails and approvals

  • Councils that debate

    The chair plans steps, members work in parallel and spawn helpers, and every claim can be challenged for proof. The members converge on what they agree, a scribe compiles it, and every author co-signs it. Members can hand self-contained tasks to smaller sub-councils.

    Runs and modes

  • Open protocols, tamper-evident

    Argus is an MCP and A2A server and client. Every inbound and outbound protocol call is written to a SHA-256 hash chain that detects any edit, deletion or reordering.

    Protocols and ledger

  • Watch it think

    Six live views of the same run: a timeline, the debate, an isometric map of agents and peers, a Gantt chart, a who-talks-when heatmap and a route from plan to deliverable.

    Run views

Install

git clone https://github.com/lordprime/Argus-Council.git
cd Argus-Council
./scripts/deploy.sh --smoke     # generates secrets, builds, starts, waits, smoke-tests

Open http://localhost:8080 and register: the first account becomes an admin. Without provider keys every council runs on the offline, deterministic mock provider, so you can try the whole flow before adding ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, OPENAI_API_KEY or a self-hosted endpoint to deploy/.env. See Getting started.

Built to be left running

The stack runs as non-root containers with read-only root filesystems and every capability dropped. Postgres and Redis sit on an internal network with no egress, and agent shell commands run in a separate sandbox container with no network route at all. Secrets are encrypted at rest, API keys are scoped, every state-changing request is audited, and Prometheus metrics cover runs, LLM spend, tools, intercepts and protocol calls (Security, Deployment and operations).

Where to go next

  • Introduction

    What a council is, the design principles, and a tour of the web UI.

  • Architecture

    Containers and networks, the run lifecycle, the deliberation sequence and the module map.

  • Getting Started

    Deploy with Docker, add providers, run your first council from the UI or curl.

  • Configuration

    Every ARGUS_* environment variable with its default, and the provider keys.

  • Concepts

    Councils and roles, runs and modes, guardrails, sub-councils, skills, knowledge and memory.

  • Protocols and Ledger

    MCP and A2A in both directions, MCP trust levels and the hash-chained ledger.

  • Integration

    Webhooks, idempotent run creation, pagination, API keys, scopes and roles.

  • API Reference

    The full REST API, generated from the server's OpenAPI document.

  • Deployment and Operations

    Deploy, update, roll back, back up, restore, retention and observability.