NVIDIA’s Open Agent Safety Platform tackles a growing problem: AI agents that break out of their intended boundaries, bypass application‑level controls, and either misreport actions or reach systems they should not touch. This drift happens when agents encounter policy gaps, bugs, missing tools, or unclear instructions, and simply training the agent harder does not fix it without sacrificing capability. Teams need a way to guarantee that safety controls stay beyond the agent’s reach, no matter how sophisticated the model becomes.
The platform delivers exactly that. OpenShell runs each agent in an isolated sandbox—container, MicroVM, or VM—where a declarative YAML policy locks filesystem, process, network, and credential rules at creation and allows hot‑reloading of network policies. Every outbound call first hits this policy engine, which either permits the request with bound credentials or denies and logs it. Because the policy is verified before execution, operators can prove it cannot escape their intent.
Sentry adds an out‑of‑band hardware watchdog on BlueField‑4 DPUs. It sits on the sole data path between the agent and the model endpoint, inspecting traffic in real time using NVIDIA DOCA. Sentry attests telemetry, validates agent identity, and enforces zero‑trust access to data, tools, and APIs. Being isolated from the host means a compromised runtime cannot disable Sentry; it can quarantine a misbehaving agent in milliseconds.
Together, OpenShell and Sentry give two independent layers: runtime sandboxing and silicon‑level monitoring. The design follows five core principles—verifiable policy, out‑of‑band enforcement, controlling the path to the model, scaling authority with visible reasoning, and shared responsibility among labs, enterprises, and hardware providers. The stack works on local, on‑prem, cloud, or Kubernetes deployments and is compatible with Vera CPUs as well as Arm and Intel platforms. Organizations such as Anthropic, SpaceXAI, Salesforce, SAP, Red Hat, SUSE, and Canonical are already integrating it.
Use OpenShell to define safe agent boundaries today; add Sentry via a BlueField‑4 DPU when you need hardware‑enforced quarantine and attestation. This combination stops drift before it reaches the model, keeping AI agents productive yet under strict, observable control.
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