# Introduction

Classic operating systems were built to manage scarce physical resources (CPU time, memory pages, disk blocks, network sockets) and to provide deterministic execution semantics.

Modern AI/LLM systems introduce a new class of workload:
- probabilistic outputs
- context-dependent behavior
- expensive inference
- heterogeneous accelerators
- tool-based grounding with side effects

Today these systems are assembled in userland using RPC, containers, and orchestration frameworks. That works, but the abstractions leak: context, provenance, budgets, and authority are not first-class OS concepts.

**Cognition OS** is a spec and reference design for a “cognitive kernel” control plane that governs non-deterministic computation deterministically, while keeping all learning and inference in userland services.