Who Captures Computing When the Application Disappears?

Every fifteen-to-twenty years the operating system is redesigned, and agentic AI is the trigger for the next one. As work shifts from applications a human opens to goals an agent pursues, the three foundations of the modern OS — CPU-centric scheduling, human-login security and application-siloed state — break at once. This report argues that value migrates down from the application layer into four control primitives — accelerated inference, identity, memory and scheduling (AIMS) — and scores who is positioned to own them on a proprietary Agent-Native Capture Index (ANCI): in 2026 there is no Primitive Owner, and the leaders win on breadth, not depth. It maps the Post-Application Stack layer by layer, traces the hardware chokepoints (advanced packaging, HBM, export policy), and sets out where India — strong in public digital infrastructure and sovereign compute, dependent on the AIMS primitives — can capture the next layer rather than the last one. Eight parts, twenty-six chapters, eighteen figures and the PAS / AIMS / ANCI framework family. Free, and readable in full on this page.