Updated Oct. 24, 2026, 1:24 a.m. ET: Adds NVIDIA’s Oct. 21 announcement of the OpenShell Reference Architecture at GTC Berlin.
NVIDIA wants a safety layer for AI agents that the agents themselves can’t get around. Its new Open Agent Safety Platform, announced Monday, pairs open-source runtime software called OpenShell with Sentry, a hardware watchdog that runs on BlueField-4 data processing units.
The company said in its announcement that recent security incidents follow the same pattern: “the agent circumvented security controls at the application layer to complete its assigned task.” Its answer is to enforce limits outside the model and agent harness, in both software and silicon.
OpenShell sets a runtime boundary for agents running on CPUs, tracing their actions and enforcing policy across open and closed models. NVIDIA tuned it for its Vera CPU, but because it is open source it can be extended to Arm and Intel platforms. According to Infosecurity Magazine, a supervisor paired with each OpenShell sandbox checks outbound requests against policy, while the sandbox applies kernel-level filesystem and process controls.
Sentry is part of a reference system design rather than the open-source release. It watches agent behavior from an isolated, out-of-band trust domain on the DPU and, NVIDIA said, can quarantine and stop an agent that tries to move outside its software boundary in milliseconds. It is built on NVIDIA’s DOCA software, which it uses to inspect agent requests and responses, verify agent identity and enforce zero-trust access rules for data, tools, APIs and services.
Who is signing on
NVIDIA said more than 100 organizations are working with the platform’s technologies. Salesforce has wired OpenShell into Slack so teams can view agent activity and audit events and approve or reject requests for more permissions. SAP is embedding it in Joule Studio, and Anthropic has integrated Claude Managed Agents with OpenShell and BlueField.
“Companies are giving AI agents more of their most important work, and they need to direct and verify what those agents do, especially in sensitive environments,” said Paul Smith, Anthropic’s chief commercial officer.
Robotics companies Figure, Gecko Robotics and Skild AI are building with OpenShell for machines that act in the physical world, and Citi and JPMorganChase are among the financial firms collaborating on the open-source tools. Canonical, SUSE and Red Hat are integrating the platform into their operating systems.
“Safety and security require full-stack engineering,” NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said in the release.
The software, including OpenShell and its skills, is available through NVIDIA’s developer resources and GitHub. At GTC Berlin on Oct. 21, NVIDIA followed up with the OpenShell Reference Architecture, which combines OpenShell with Vera Rubin systems, Vera CPUs and Sentry on BlueField-4 and extends to RTX Spark, DGX Spark and DGX Station at the edge (WebProNews coverage).
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