ICML position paper: every agent framework has reimplemented an operating system badly, so build the OS layer

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arXiv 2609.19203 (2026-09-16, ICML 2026 Position Paper Track, with Ian Foster among the authors) argues that protocols like MCP and A2A solved connectivity while leaving each framework to embed its own implicit runtime for state, memory, budgets and guardrails, which makes agent behavior non-portable and governance brittle. The analogy they lean on is computing before operating systems, when every program reimplemented basic services. Their proposal is a Foundation Model Operating System that virtualizes model interactions the way a VM abstracts hardware, giving applications the illusion of dedicated trustworthy instances while internally orchestrating memory tiers, model selection, resource allocation, verification and policy enforcement, and learning from operational experience when to intervene and when to let inference run.