TopoClaw: A Human-Centric and Topology-Aware Agent Operating System

TL;DR

TopoClaw introduces a human-centric, topology-aware Agent Operating System that manages distributed device actions, social identities, and authority governance to enable accountable, collaborative autonomy across physical and social boundaries.

Contribution

It presents a novel OS design modeling physical and social topologies, enabling cross-device actions, identity attribution, and authority governance for autonomous, collaborative workflows.

Findings

Decouples intent from actuation for distributed device control

Treats agents as socially situated Digital Twins with role-aware permissions

Implements distributed policy enforcement across trust boundaries

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have evolved AI assistants into autonomous reasoning engines that maintain context, invoke tools, and pursue long-horizon tasks. This has spurred Agent Operating Systems (Agent OS) as kernel-like layers for lifecycle management, memory, scheduling, and access control. Yet most designs remain agent-centric, treating the OS as a single-host runtime for internal reasoning and tool use, leaving open how autonomous actions integrate with distributed, collaborative, permission-sensitive workflows. TopoClaw is an open-source, human-centric, topology-aware Agent OS modeling the user's ecosystem as two coupled structures: a physical device topology of heterogeneous surfaces and a social relationship topology of shared spaces, teams, and delegated roles. It unifies device operation, messaging, and skills around accountable cross-boundary execution, with three core contributions: (1) cross-device action placement, decoupling intent from actuation and routing distributed actions across the device cluster based on hardware affordances and user context; (2) cross-user identity attribution, treating agents as socially situated "Digital Twins" that coordinate in multi-user spaces while preserving provenance, role-aware permissions, and human accountability; (3) cross-context authority governance, pairing broad capability with distributed, context-aware policy enforcement across physical and social trust boundaries to bound proactive autonomy at the OS layer. This report presents TopoClaw as an engineering-oriented reference architecture, covering its design principles, runtime, cross-device execution, collaboration mechanisms, security model, and deployment outlook.