Former Android leaders are building an ‘operating system for AI agents’

A new startup created by former Android leaders aims to build an operating system for AI agents. Among them is Hugo Barra, Google’s former VP of Android product management, who says the new company — named “/dev/agents” — will revisit the leaders’ “Android roots.”

AI companies are pushing AI agents as the next big leap in AI tools, promising digital assistants that can carry out tasks and make decisions autonomously and with little human input. Companies like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI each have plans to launch some version of this concept as a product in the next few months.

“We can see the promise of AI agents, but as a developer, it’s just too hard to build anything good,” /dev/agents cofounder and CEO and Google’s former Android VP of engineering David Singleton told Bloomberg. He said the industry needs “an Android-like moment for AI.”

The company is working on a cloud-based “next-gen operating system for AI agents” intended “for trusted agents to work with users across all of their devices,” Singleton wrote in a post on X. He said that AI agents will “need new UI patterns, a reimagined privacy model, and a developer platform that makes it radically simpler to build useful agents.”

Barra, who is serving as /dev/agents’ chief product officer, was a big public face for Android at Google, having managed the project during the early teens. He later worked for Xiaomi and then as the leader of Facebook’s Oculus VR team. Bloomberg notes that he and Singleton are joined at /dev/agents by CTO Ficus Kirkpatrick, an early Android engineer who was a VP of AR and VR at Meta, and chief design officer Nicholas Jitkoff, who worked on ChromeOS design.