OpenMAIC

OpenMAIC turns a topic into a classroom of AI agents that teach and argue while you watch. AI teachers lecture while AI peers discuss and push back, so what you take away comes out of the exchange instead of one flat chatbot answer. Built by Tsinghua University researchers, grounded in a paper published in the Journal of Computer Science and Technology, and free to run.

You run it yourself and bring your own model keys. Recent releases added a Pro Mode that turns any generated slide into an editable canvas, plus MP4 export, so a session can leave as a video file instead of living in a browser tab. Setup is a build step and API keys, not a one click install, and output quality tracks whichever model you point it at.

The big change since spring: the project relicensed from AGPL-3.0 to MIT in June 2026. That takes the legal question off the table for anyone who wanted to embed this in a commercial product or offer it as a hosted service. Solo learners and teachers: run it locally and pay only for tokens. Teams building training content: usable now, and MIT means you can fork it into your own stack without a lawyer.

The catch: multiple agents means multiplied token bills. A thirty minute session with three agents costs roughly three times what the same ground covered by a single chatbot would, and video export adds render time on your own machine. It is still an academic codebase, so expect rough edges where a product would have polish.