AgentOS Guide: Give Your AI Agents an Operating System

What Is AgentOS?

AgentOS is an open-source library that gives AI agents their own operating system. Instead of running agents inside fragile sandboxes, expensive VMs, or proprietary SaaS platforms, AgentOS integrates directly into your existing backend as a lightweight library — powered by WebAssembly and V8 isolates.

Developed by Rivet, AgentOS solves a fundamental problem: how do you give autonomous AI agents safe access to file systems, networking, process management, and persistent state without compromising security? The answer is a library that implements an operating system surface specifically designed for AI agents.

Key Features

• WebAssembly Sandboxing: Every agent runs in its own WASM isolate with fine-grained resource limits.
• V8 Isolate Technology: Leverages Google's battle-tested V8 engine for secure code execution and state isolation.
• No Infrastructure Overhead: Runs as a library in your existing backend — no Docker containers, VMs, or sidecars required.
• File System Access: Agents can read, write, and manage files within their allocated storage space.
• Networking: Controlled network access so agents can make API calls and fetch data safely.
• Process Management: Agents can spawn and manage sub-processes within their isolated environment.
• State Persistence: Agent state survives restarts and can be serialized across sessions.
• Language Agnostic: Use with any language that compiles to WebAssembly — Rust, Go, C, C++, and more.

Why AgentOS Instead of Sandboxes?

Traditional agent sandboxing uses heavyweight Docker containers or cloud VMs — each with significant boot time, memory overhead, and operational complexity. AgentOS takes a different approach: it uses WebAssembly (WASM) isolates that boot in milliseconds and use a fraction of the memory. This makes it ideal for running hundreds or thousands of agents concurrently on a single machine.

Use Cases