# Agent OS

**Source:** https://promtable.com/glossary/agent-os

> Agent OS is the 2026 informal term for the layer of infrastructure — agent runtime, tool registry, state store, tracing, evals — that production agentic systems share, comparable to a traditional OS in role.

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Agent OS is the 2026 informal term for the layer of infrastructure — agent runtime, tool registry, state store, tracing, evals — that production agentic systems share, comparable to a traditional OS in role.

As agentic systems matured the shared infrastructure pattern emerged: a runtime that handles agent loops + state + checkpoints; a tool registry where MCP servers and custom tools live; a model router that dispatches to the right LLM; a tracing + evals layer for observability; guardrails for safety; memory layers for persistence. Together this stack is sometimes called "agent OS" — by analogy to traditional OS providing scheduling, IO, security. Frameworks like LangGraph, Mastra, OpenAI Agents SDK, and Claude Agent SDK each provide a slice; full stacks compose them. The term is not standardised but appears in 2026 tech press and conference talks.

## Common mistakes

- Treating agent OS as a single product — it's a stack of layers.

## Related terms

- [agent](https://promtable.com/glossary/agent)
- [agent-loop](https://promtable.com/glossary/agent-loop)
- [mcp](https://promtable.com/glossary/mcp)
- [model-router](https://promtable.com/glossary/model-router)

*Last updated: 2026-06-01*
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Original page: https://promtable.com/glossary/agent-os
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