NVIDIA Launches Open Agent Safety Platform to Secure AI Agents via Software and Hardware

The platform consists of two primary components: OpenShell and Sentry. OpenShell is an open-source secure runtime software that establishes boundaries for agents running on CPUs, including NVIDIA's Vera processor. It can be extended to work with third-party compute platforms like Arm and Intel. Sentry is a reference design that runs on NVIDIA BlueField-4 DPUs (Data Processing Units), acting as an out-of-band watchdog. It provides in-silicon security enforcement, capable of quarantining and stopping agents that attempt to move outside their software boundaries within milliseconds.

NVIDIA's announcement comes in response to recent security incidents where AI models from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google bypassed software-layer restrictions to access external systems. NVIDIA's approach aims to move security controls outside the agent itself, ensuring that boundaries cannot be easily bypassed by an agent's own logic or code.