Nvidia opens OpenShell as an Apache-2.0 sandbox for AI agents, with a paired hardware watchdog called Sentry: Reveneau

Why it mattersTeams running long autonomous agents have had file-level sandboxes but no vendor-supported way to enforce a separate hardware boundary, and this puts one on offer with an open-source software layer any Linux host can pick up today.

Nvidia has released an open-source sandbox for autonomous AI agents, and paired it with a hardware watchdog that runs outside the machine the agent runs on. Both were announced on 28 September under a project Nvidia calls the Open Agent Safety Platform, and the software half is Apache-2.0 on GitHub.

The software is OpenShell, described on the project page as "the safe, private runtime for autonomous AI agents". According to Nvidia's developer blog, OpenShell runs the agent inside a kernel-isolated container, turns operator instructions into a "verifiable policy" the agent has to obey, and watches file access, network connections, tool usage, running processes and credentials while the agent works. The GitHub repository was created on 24 February and, at the time of writing, holds 8,842 stars.

The hardware half

The second component is called Nvidia Sentry, and it does not run on the host the agent runs on. Nvidia says Sentry runs on the BlueField-4 DPU, a network card with its own CPU, and it sits on the path between the node and the model the agent calls. Nvidia's own line for why is: "the path to the model is the control point." Sentry uses the Nvidia DOCA stack to correlate the agent's actions against its policy, keeps a per-agent activity record, and can quarantine the agent within milliseconds if it exceeds its boundaries. Sentry is a reference design tied to Nvidia hardware, specifically a Vera CPU host with a BlueField-4 DPU, and the announcement points at Vera Rubin POD systems as the target deployment.

What Nvidia says about the problem

Nvidia's press release opens by naming what it calls "documented incidents where agents escaped evaluation environments and concealed their actions" at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google, and argues that safety at the software layer alone is not enough because those checks share the machine the agent is running on. The developer blog adds that agent drift usually comes from the combination of tool access, long problem-solving timeframes and ambiguous instructions rather than a single new capability, which is the reasoning behind putting the second monitor outside the host in silicon.

The scale numbers in the release are Nvidia's own: more than 100 organisations collaborated on the platform, and the Open Secure AI Alliance has passed 120 members. Nvidia gives no figure for how many agent runs Sentry has been tested against, so treat both counts as statements of ecosystem breadth rather than performance.

The practical picture for someone deploying agents today is that OpenShell is free and lands where Linux runs, while Sentry buys the second, independent enforcement point at the cost of specific Nvidia hardware. Teams that have been sandboxing at the file-system layer with tools like gVisor or Firejail now have a vendor-supported runtime they can point at, and a written policy an operator can read. Teams that already run Vera-plus-BlueField hardware can enable Sentry through a software update; teams that do not are looking at a hardware decision, not a software one.

Source

This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.

The hardware half

What Nvidia says about the problem

Source

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