Towards an Agent Operating System - Lessons from Classical and Cloud OS

2026-07-27

AI Summary

This work addresses the lack of a unified core abstraction and semantic specification in current agent systems, which hinders application portability, cross-platform interoperability, and large-scale deployment. Drawing inspiration from the evolutionary trajectories of operating systems and cloud-native infrastructures, it systematically adapts the successful paradigms of POSIX and Kubernetes to the agent domain for the first time. By extending classical system primitives and introducing formal semantics, the paper defines novel, stable abstractions tailored to large language model–driven environments, encompassing core agent behaviors such as planning, tool invocation, memory management, and collaboration. This foundation enables portable, composable agent applications with significantly enhanced cross-platform reliability, thereby advancing agent systems from experimental prototypes toward a mature, scalable ecosystem.

Abstract

Every major wave of platform software follows the same arc: an initial period of experimentation with competing frameworks and ad-hoc implementations, followed by the articulation of a small set of stable abstractions with well-defined semantics, and finally consolidation around those abstractions into a platform that applications can portably target. POSIX did this for classical operating systems; Kubernetes did it for the cloud. Agentic AI systems - autonomous, LLM-driven agents that plan, use tools, maintain memory, and collaborate - are currently in the experimentation phase of the third such wave. dozens of frameworks and protocols have emerged, but no community consensus exists on what the core abstractions are or what guarantees they carry. Without that consensus, agentic applications cannot be written portably, platforms cannot compose reliably, and the field cannot advance beyond prototype deployments. We argue that the path forward is to follow the prior-wave methodology: derive new agentic abstractions by extending classical OS and cloud OS primitives to stochastic, natural-language-mediated execution, specify their semantics precisely, and consolidate around them - just as POSIX and Kubernetes consolidated their respective waves.

Problem

• Agentic AI
• operating system abstractions
• portability
• semantic specification
• platform consolidation

Innovation

• Agent Operating System
• Agentic AI
• OS Abstractions
• Portable AI Agents
• Stochastic Execution