# NVIDIA OpenShell

NVIDIA offers OpenShell as a key component of its Open Agent Safety Platform, a runtime with sandboxed execution and policy-based controls that safeguards sensitive data, manages access to enterprise tools and governs autonomous agent actions. Korean AI security company AIM Intelligence is integrating its Starfort agent control platform with OpenShell, aiming to combine the runtime's access controls with Starfort's detection of malicious instructions and data leakage. On the model side, LG AI Research is opening application programming interface access for K-EXAONE-2.5, developed using the Nemotron-Personas-Korea dataset of 7 million synthetic Korean personas.

NVIDIA offers OpenShell as a key component of its Open Agent Safety Platform, a runtime with sandboxed execution and policy-based controls that safeguards sensitive data, manages access to enterprise tools and governs autonomous agent actions. Korean AI security company AIM Intelligence is integrating its Starfort agent control platform with OpenShell, aiming to combine the runtime's access controls with Starfort's detection of malicious instructions and data leakage. On the model side, LG AI Research is opening application programming interface access for K-EXAONE-2.5, developed using the Nemotron-Personas-Korea dataset of 7 million synthetic Korean personas.

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, NVIDIA said it is donating OpenShell, an open source runtime for securing and governing autonomous agents, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Sandbox project, while also contributing to Google-led Agent Substrate and releasing three new components of the DSX AI Factory Platform. OpenShell applies deterministic controls to agent activity so teams can enforce policies as agents use tools, access inference services and execute workloads, and its extensible architecture connects their own compute, inference providers, credential storage and monitoring tools. NVIDIA says hundreds of organizations have put OpenShell to use and the project has received tens of thousands of contributions in less than a year since launch.

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, NVIDIA said it is donating OpenShell, an open source runtime for securing and governing autonomous agents, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Sandbox project, while also contributing to Google-led Agent Substrate and releasing three new components of the DSX AI Factory Platform. OpenShell applies deterministic controls to agent activity so teams can enforce policies as agents use tools, access inference services and execute workloads, and its extensible architecture connects their own compute, inference providers, credential storage and monitoring tools. NVIDIA says hundreds of organizations have put OpenShell to use and the project has received tens of thousands of contributions in less than a year since launch.

NVIDIA announced the Open Agent Safety Platform, an open software platform and reference system design, and collaborated with Anthropic to combine Claude Managed Agents with the open source NVIDIA OpenShell runtime: Managed Agents keeps the passwords and access keys an agent needs in a separate vault so the agent never sees them and adds audit trails plus integration with existing access controls, while OpenShell enforces policies outside the agent for every tool, file, network connection and data access, blocking everything unless a rule allows it and logging every decision it allows or blocks, so teams can start with narrow permissions, review the log, tighten rules toward least access with Claude, and use the policy prover to confirm by mathematical proof what the agent can reach under

NVIDIA announced the Open Agent Safety Platform, an open software platform and reference system design, and collaborated with Anthropic to combine Claude Managed Agents with the open source NVIDIA OpenShell runtime: Managed Agents keeps the passwords and access keys an agent needs in a separate vault so the agent never sees them and adds audit trails plus integration with existing access controls, while OpenShell enforces policies outside the agent for every tool, file, network connection and data access, blocking everything unless a rule allows it and logging every decision it allows or blocks, so teams can start with narrow permissions, review the log, tighten rules toward least access with Claude, and use the policy prover to confirm by mathematical proof what the agent can reach under

NVIDIA released OpenShell 0.1.0, an open-source runtime that enforces agent permissions outside the workload through kernel-level sandbox controls, a supervisor that inspects HTTP, GraphQL, and MCP traffic, credential custody, and formal policy analysis; the post's curl example against the GitHub REST API shows a read-only policy allowing reads while blocking a POST write, and it reports that in long-horizon adversarial experiments frontier agents with reduced safeguards spent up to two hours trying to persuade an AI reviewer to grant permissions to modify a protected repository, while formal policy analysis gave the reviewer evidence of what those permissions allowed and no protected repository writes occurred in these tests.

NVIDIA released OpenShell 0.1.0, an open-source runtime that enforces agent permissions outside the workload through kernel-level sandbox controls, a supervisor that inspects HTTP, GraphQL, and MCP traffic, credential custody, and formal policy analysis; the post's curl example against the GitHub REST API shows a read-only policy allowing reads while blocking a POST write, and it reports that in long-horizon adversarial experiments frontier agents with reduced safeguards spent up to two hours trying to persuade an AI reviewer to grant permissions to modify a protected repository, while formal policy analysis gave the reviewer evidence of what those permissions allowed and no protected repository writes occurred in these tests.

NVIDIA introduced an open agent safety platform comprising OpenShell, an Apache 2.0 open-source secure runtime that executes autonomous agents in kernel-isolated sandboxes and turns operator instructions into a verifiable policy checked before and enforced during execution, plus optional NVIDIA Sentry and DOCA layers that push monitoring and enforcement into BlueField hardware, where in a Vera Rubin POD each compute tray carries a BlueField-4 DPU on the node's only path to the model for continuous out-of-band observability and line-speed real-time policy enforcement, with the company stating that on existing Vera and BlueField-4 systems these protections need only a software update.

NVIDIA introduced an open agent safety platform comprising OpenShell, an Apache 2.0 open-source secure runtime that executes autonomous agents in kernel-isolated sandboxes and turns operator instructions into a verifiable policy checked before and enforced during execution, plus optional NVIDIA Sentry and DOCA layers that push monitoring and enforcement into BlueField hardware, where in a Vera Rubin POD each compute tray carries a BlueField-4 DPU on the node's only path to the model for continuous out-of-band observability and line-speed real-time policy enforcement, with the company stating that on existing Vera and BlueField-4 systems these protections need only a software update.

This article argues that AI security should be treated as an engineering problem requiring defined security requirements, enforceable controls, named owners, and evidence that protections work, and proposes that security depends on the full agent stack (models, harnesses, runtime environments) working together, introducing NVIDIA OpenShell as an open source secure runtime with integrations across Open Secure AI Alliance partners, along with defensive tool examples such as CrowdStrike SafeMind, Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS, Capital One VulnHunter, and ReversingLabs Spectra Assure, while emphasizing open sharing of failure evidence and verification methods to shift advantage toward defenders.

This article argues that AI security should be treated as an engineering problem requiring defined security requirements, enforceable controls, named owners, and evidence that protections work, and proposes that security depends on the full agent stack (models, harnesses, runtime environments) working together, introducing NVIDIA OpenShell as an open source secure runtime with integrations across Open Secure AI Alliance partners, along with defensive tool examples such as CrowdStrike SafeMind, Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS, Capital One VulnHunter, and ReversingLabs Spectra Assure, while emphasizing open sharing of failure evidence and verification methods to shift advantage toward defenders.