Osprey: Production-ready agentic AI for safety-critical control systems

Operating large-scale scientific facilities requires coordinating diverse subsystems, translating operator intent into precise hardware actions, and maintaining strict safety oversight. Language model-driven agents offer a natural interface for these tasks, but most existing approaches are not yet reliable or safe enough for production use. In this paper, we introduce Osprey, a framework for using agentic AI in large, safety-critical facility operations. Osprey is built around the needs of control rooms and addresses these challenges in four ways. First, it uses a plan-first orchestrator that generates complete execution plans, including all dependencies, for human review before any hardware is touched. Second, a coordination layer manages complex data flows, keeps data types consistent, and automatically downsamples large datasets when needed. Third, a classifier dynamically selects only the tools required for a given task, keeping prompts compact as facilities add capabilities. Fourth, connector abstractions and deployment patterns work across different control systems and are ready for day-to-day use. We demonstrate the framework through two case studies: a control-assistant tutorial showing semantic channel mapping and historical data integration and a production deployment at the Advanced Light Source, where Osprey manages real-time operations across hundreds of thousands of control channels. These results establish Osprey as a production-ready framework for deploying agentic AI in complex, safety-critical environments.