The Semantic Operating System (SOS) is a proposed execution architecture for long-horizon artificial intelligence systems operating under bounded-context and token-parsimony constraints. Rather than organizing execution around files, processes, and sessions, the SOS organizes execution around semantic transitions, governance receipts, and continuity graphs. The paper argues that modern AI systems are structurally inefficient because they repeatedly reacquire semantic state through raw substrate observation instead of inheriting governed continuity across sessions and agents. The SOS addresses this by introducing receipt-centric semantic governance: every admissible semantic transition produces a governed receipt bound to authority, lineage, and epistemic basis, forming an append-only continuity graph that persists across operational horizons. The architecture formalizes: semantic transitions, receipt-centric execution, continuity graphs, EpistemicPosition artifacts, escalation governance, semantic memory hierarchies, constitutional paging, semantic kernel boundaries, admissibility-gated transitions, semantic reactor theory, semantic gravitational collapse, token parsimony economics, governed semantic work units, and τ-decomposable governance traces. The paper distinguishes the SOS from: provenance systems, audit logging, event sourcing, vector-memory architectures, content-addressed storage, and blockchain systems, arguing that the SOS constitutes a distinct semantic execution ontology rather than a logging or memory enhancement layer. The work also proposes: formal invariants for semantic governance, append-only receipt invalidation semantics, semantic quarantine, semantic escalation protocols, constitutional recovery modes, and compliance levels for semantic operating systems. The SOS is presented as an emergent architectural attractor for sufficiently advanced AI systems operating over large semantic substrates where observation cost increasingly dominates reasoning cost. The paper situates the Constitutional Meaning Base (CMB), Semantic Reactor Architecture, and related Constitutional Computing systems as early deployed fragments of this broader execution model.
Adam Ableman Mazurk (Mon,) studied this question.