NVIDIA contributes OpenShell agent-security software to community governance

NVIDIA is contributing its OpenShell software for controlling autonomous AI agents to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s Sandbox. Announced November 10 at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, the move puts the project under community governance. Alongside it, NVIDIA is contributing to Google-originated Agent Substrate and working with Google to connect agent security with large-scale execution.

OpenShell is a runtime: software that manages the environment in which an agent operates. NVIDIA says it applies deterministic controls—fixed rules that enforce policy—to the agent’s activity. Those controls cover tool use, access to inference services that run AI models, and workload execution.

The runtime is designed to fit into an organization’s existing systems. Teams can connect their own computing resources, model-serving providers, credential storage and monitoring tools. NVIDIA describes that extensibility as a way to apply governance across different deployment environments while retaining connections to enterprise infrastructure.

The new development is OpenShell’s contribution to CNCF, not its initial availability. NVIDIA says hundreds of organizations have already used the software and that it has received tens of thousands of contributions in less than a year since launch. Those adoption and contribution figures are company-supplied, rather than an independent measure of the runtime’s security.

CNCF is a nonprofit within the Linux Foundation and hosts KubeCon. NVIDIA says OpenShell, as a Sandbox project, will be governed by organizations building it into their products. The company’s stated aim is to let the community inspect and improve the security infrastructure, with security professionals contributing to the safeguards.

“NVIDIA’s contribution of OpenShell to CNCF gives developers a shared foundation to build on and an opportunity to shape how agent security evolves.”

Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation

Agent Substrate addresses a different operational problem: running long-lived agents at scale. The Google-led open-source framework has also been accepted into the CNCF Sandbox. It operates on Kubernetes, the open-source system for managing applications across computing infrastructure.

According to NVIDIA, Agent Substrate preserves an agent’s environment between tasks while releasing computing resources when the agent is idle. It suspends and resumes those environments across a shared pool of agents. That separates keeping a session available from keeping dedicated computing resources running for it continuously.

NVIDIA is also working to make Agent Substrate operate with Dynamo, its software for serving AI models, and KAI Scheduler, which allocates shared cluster resources. The effort connects three jobs: running the agent, supplying model responses and assigning computing capacity.

NVIDIA and Google are collaborating on the OpenShell–Agent Substrate integration so enterprises can secure and govern agents across cloud services and systems on their own premises. This is integration work underway, rather than a newly completed combined product.