❯ Nvidia launches the Open Agent Safety Platform, pairing a CPU sandbox with DPU hardware monitoring to keep AI agents contained, with 100+ partners

Two lines of defenseNvidia has launched the Open Agent Safety Platform, an open software platform and reference system design that limits autonomous AI agents at two layers. CNBC reports that OpenShell runs on the CPU and restricts what an agent can do, under an Apache 2.0 open-source license, while Sentry runs on BlueField-4 DPUs. A DPU is a dedicated processing chip on the network card, separate from the host, so neither the agent nor an attacker can reach it; Sentry watches agent behavior from that trust domain and, Nvidia says, quarantines and stops an agent that steps out of bounds within milliseconds.

Agent breakouts are the backdropRecent weeks have brought several reports of AI agents breaching website security controls and posting to third-party sites without permission, and OpenAI is dealing with its own such incidents. Nvidia designed the system as monitoring the agent cannot switch off, aimed squarely at this problem: with software rules alone, an agent may be able to rewrite or bypass the environment it runs in.

More than a hundred partnersPer Nvidia’s announcement and press coverage, more than 100 organizations were involved at launch, including Anthropic, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Dell, HPE, Microsoft, Palantir, Red Hat, Salesforce, SAP, Scale AI, ServiceNow and SpaceXAI. Nvidia is also working with Anthropic to connect cloud-managed agents to OpenShell.

A new item for the security shopping listEnterprise security leads deploying agents get a new demand to make: monitoring in hardware, so that when something goes wrong the agent cannot stop it itself. It also gives BlueField a new job and extends Nvidia’s pitch from compute to security.

▪ SIGNALThe stronger the agent, the more it needs a supervisor it cannot reach, and that gives security a hardware product line that can carry a price tag.