Concat, a free open-source CapCut replacement, ships an MCP server so Claude can cut your video on your own machine

Chris Pirillo at a desk sliding strips of film into a laptop timeline while a small friendly robot holds scissors over the clips — Illustration: LockerGnome

Type concat --mcp and a video editor becomes something an AI agent can drive. That’s the line in Concat’s MCP guide that sets it apart from the other CapCut clones: an agent “can then create projects, import media, cut, add titles and captions, keyframe, apply effects, look at frames and export, with the same edit commands the window uses.”

For Claude Code, the setup is a single command, claude mcp add concat -- /Applications/Concat.app/Contents/MacOS/concat --mcp. One of the tools, preview_frame, hands the agent the composited frame as an image, so it can look at its own edit before it exports.

For people, the README pitches the usual CapCut kit “with none of the catches: no watermark, no account, no subscription, no upload.” Captions come from local Whisper, background removal and voice cloning (“any voice from a few seconds of a recording”) run on your machine, and exports go up to 4K 60 in H.264, HEVC or AV1. The project’s site adds, “There is no paid tier to unlock and never will be.”

The repository went up on August 25, 2026. Since then it has passed 11,000 stars, and the release files for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and sideloaded iOS have been downloaded 269,043 times as of October 23.

Most of that is one developer. GitHub credits 1,037 commits to jub0t, Jareer A. (@jarears on X, per his GitHub profile), and the next-busiest contributor has 47. The code signing policy lists him as the only committer, reviewer and approver.

He wrote the house rules in the announcement thread, which still links its issues under the project’s old name, WolfCut: “No Third Party API/Cloud integration such as voice generators, image generators, video generators, etc.” Anything added “must run locally (no APIs) and must be performant and scalable enough to run on most devices (potatoes).”

The agent doesn’t get your screen yet. The guide says it “edits projects of its own; it does not edit the project open in the window while you watch,” and the live version is still an open issue.

Why it matters

The agent edits through a locked door. In window mode the guide says “the agent cannot open the project you have on screen and save over it,” every Concat process locks the project folders it has open, and an agent writes files “only under your home folder” unless you widen it. Those are the rules you’d want before letting any agent near a deadline project.

Local AI is the whole selling point. The captions, voices and cutout models “download once from Settings and work offline after that,” per the README, and “Your footage never leaves your disk.” For anyone whose clips include a client’s screen or a customer’s face, that’s a privacy policy written as architecture.

Unsigned means you click past warnings. The Windows builds “are not code-signed yet,” the signing policy says, so SmartScreen warns first and Smart App Control “refuses to run it at all.” On macOS the README’s fix is a Terminal command that strips the quarantine flag.

The next step is the one the guide already names: live mode, where the agent edits the project in the window while you watch. Once that lands, the question shifts from whether an agent can cut a video to whether you’d let it cut yours with your hand off the mouse. With one person holding every commit key, the other thing to watch is whether a second reviewer shows up before the project’s first stable release.

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