Cloudflare Announces Open-Source Cloudflare OS As AI 'Operating System' (phoronix.com) 19
Cloudflare has open-sourced Cloudflare OS, an Apache 2.0-licensed platform that lets organizations build AI agents, apps, and workflows using curated company data and tools within isolated, governed environments. Despite the name, it is not a traditional operating system but a framework for securely managing organizational AI workloads. Phoronix reports: Cloudflare OS is already used internally at Cloudflare and is described in today's announcement as:
"Cloudflare OS starts with a conversation in your browser, like many other AI tools. What makes it different is that each conversation is grounded in the context and skills your organization has curated. Give your workspace a goal, and it can draw on that knowledge and work with the tools and data your organization already uses to achieve it.
Cloudflare OS combines three parts:
- An agent workspace grounded in context and skills your company curates, with an isolated runtime where agents can write and run code.
- A new security and governance framework for safe access to internal data and services.
- A platform for personal, modifiable apps that people can build, share, and continue changing.
What begins as a conversation can become a doc, an app, or a workflow that continues doing the work." You can learn more at os.cloudflare.app.
Cloudflare OS combines three parts:
- An agent workspace grounded in context and skills your company curates, with an isolated runtime where agents can write and run code.
- A new security and governance framework for safe access to internal data and services.
- A platform for personal, modifiable apps that people can build, share, and continue changing.
What begins as a conversation can become a doc, an app, or a workflow that continues doing the work." You can learn more at os.cloudflare.app.
Curate This (Score:5, Insightful)
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It wasn't that hard to read unless I misread. The curation happens before using. By giving it API information and credentials to connect to company systems.
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I wonder what "curate" means here. Is this just an LLM with a questionnaire in front?
Please select from this list of buzzwords your company is interested in so we can curate your experience:
- Cognitive Orchestration Fabric
- Enterprise Synergy Architecture
- Predictive Enablement Frameworks
- Hyperautomation Platforms
- Infinite Improbability Drives
We make fun of people using an LLM to spellcheck an email, yet here we are asking a human to define a common word, right?
Curate means you choose what goes in. Like monthly.xls orgchart.doc and context, for example, "This field means employee is NLE, unless they were a contractor, then it means the contract ...". This ain't rocket AI neurosurgery my dudes. Anyone can do that individually with existing tools, but what Cloudflare is trying to do, I guess, is make it easier to do that from one place and share w
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Curation: it belongs in a museum!
Seems more like cold reading. People seem inordinately impressed when something they just said is repeated back to them.
Sandbox, NOT an operating system. (Score:5, Insightful)
From the repo README [github.com]
This is not a traditional computer operating system. We use the term "operating system" in two senses:
* An operating system for the company to be productive with AI, in a way that is safe, so that the security team can sleep at night.
* An operating system for AI workloads, analogous to the sense in which a traditional operating system manages compute workloads.
It's an AI sandbox.
I absolutely object to their misuse of existing terminology.
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From the repo README [github.com]
This is not a traditional computer operating system. We use the term "operating system" in two senses:
* An operating system for the company to be productive with AI, in a way that is safe, so that the security team can sleep at night.
* An operating system for AI workloads, analogous to the sense in which a traditional operating system manages compute workloads.
It's an AI sandbox.
I absolutely object to their misuse of existing terminology.
Mmmm... if we're going to nitpick terminology, Claude code or codex in a container with access to your GitHub repo is a typical AI sandbox. Anything from a dedicated Mac-mini to an actual container in the cloud running a coding CLI is what comes to mind.
This is a type of shared, multi-user AI sandbox, and that's probably where the idea to call it OS comes from. It's dumb, but I get it. So a centralized MCP configuration, shared skills and prompts, shared agent configs, some kind of centralized knowledge sys
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Wikipedia for "Operating system"
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.[1]
Seeing as how it doesn't even resemble an OS, it's not a nitpick, it is pointing out a misnomer. Everything beyond that point is not my concern.
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mmm... built on NPM. No supply-chain issues there...
And yeah... fuck the marketer who decided to call this an "OS". I hate it when people pervert the meanings of words.
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Reminds me of the Robot Operating System https://www.ros.org/ [ros.org]
It's really a bunch of utilities that let you route sensor data through pipes and sockets.
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Even their Github reads like marketing, even while calling out that it's not just marketing.
The OS terminology isn't entirely marketing. Cloudflare OS is actually analogous to an operating system on a technical level.
Normal OS vs Cloudflare OS
kernel: packages/workshop-backend
device drivers: packages/gatekeeper-*
shell: packages/workshop-frontend
processes: gadgets
executables: blueprints
users: users
ACLs: shared permissions
???: agents
Re: What could possibly go wrong? (Score:2)
I'm not sure where I hate them calling it an OS more than inventing a bunch of new words for everything, none of which needed a new name
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Funny)
I hate it when people pervert the meanings of words.
Oh, you mean the primary activity of marketing people and their intellectual and emotional equals - 14-year-old girls?
However ... (Score:2)
Cloudflare has jumped the shark (Score:2)
Selling the poison and the cure (Score:4, Interesting)
Wait, what domain? (Score:2)
Wow (Score:2)
So they don't even try to hide the fact this article is a blatant ad?