# Agent Substrate

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 has donated Agent Substrate, an open-source runtime for running large numbers of sandboxed AI agents on Kubernetes, to the CNCF Sandbox. Agents spend most of their time waiting on a prompt, a tool result or a model response; keeping one Pod per session holds memory for idle sessions, while creating Pods on demand pays a multi-second cold start at every step and loses state. Agent Substrate multiplexes many sessions over a small pool of warm worker Pods, checkpointing idle sessions including memory and filesystem and restoring them onto whichever worker is free, and the project reports 10x higher density than standard containers.

NVIDIA has donated Agent Substrate, an open-source runtime for running large numbers of sandboxed AI agents on Kubernetes, to the CNCF Sandbox. Agents spend most of their time waiting on a prompt, a tool result or a model response; keeping one Pod per session holds memory for idle sessions, while creating Pods on demand pays a multi-second cold start at every step and loses state. Agent Substrate multiplexes many sessions over a small pool of warm worker Pods, checkpointing idle sessions including memory and filesystem and restoring them onto whichever worker is free, and the project reports 10x higher density than standard containers.