Constitutional Operating Systems
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Every operating system enforces a constitution. It determines which artifacts may bind, which effects may execute, who may amend system behavior, and under what authority changes become legitimate. Yet in contemporary computing stacks this constitutional layer is rarely explicit. It is distributed across codebases, build systems, vendor signing infrastructure, community governance processes, configuration files, and undocumented assumptions. This paper formalizes the "constitutional layer" of computing as a first-class, inspectable artifact--proposing a structural method to make authority, admissibility, and amendment in operating systems auditable by design. Using the Specification--Configuration--Implementation (SCI) lens and the Meta-Compilation Intermediate Representation (MCIR) substrate introduced in prior work , we analyze major OS families as distinct constitutional arrangements and outline how a constitutional operating system could render its governance layer structurally visible. The claim is architectural. It does not seek to centralize control or eliminate trust. It seeks to reveal the governance that already exists. \newpage
Author: Ableman, Adam
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225010638