Naive

AUTOPSY REPORT

Naive (YC S25) raised $2M+ marketing themselves as builders of "autonomous AI employees." Public investigation by @NotOnKetamine traced the entire underlying platform to Paperclip — a 41K-star MIT-licensed open source agent framework — with Naive having stripped attribution and rebranded the original code as proprietary . The additions on top of Paperclip were thin: Stripe billing wrappers ($0.50/credit), domain/email provisioning for agents, phone/SMS via standard providers, and a Composio integration layer. The OSS license required attribution and license preservation; Naive shipped neither. The investigation surfaced screenshots, curl-verifiable evidence, and side-by-side comparisons. As of April 2026, the company has not publicly responded to the receipts.

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