NVIDIA announced it is contributing OpenShell, an open source runtime for securing and governing autonomous agents, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Sandbox project, according to a company blog post. The donation was announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon.
As a CNCF Sandbox project, OpenShell will be governed by organizations building it into their products, NVIDIA said. The runtime gives organizations control over AI agent activities by applying what the company describes as deterministic controls to agent operations, allowing teams to enforce policies as agents use tools, access inference services and execute workloads.
OpenShell’s architecture is designed to let teams connect their own compute, inference providers, credential storage and monitoring tools, according to NVIDIA.
NVIDIA is also contributing to Agent Substrate, an open source Google-led framework for operating long-running agent workloads at scale on Kubernetes that has been accepted into the CNCF Sandbox.
Additionally, NVIDIA announced new components of its DSX AI Factory Platform: NVIDIA Kubernetes Engine, NVIDIA Kubernetes Recipes and NVIDIA Snapshot. The company said these tools help teams deploy, manage and scale GPU infrastructure on Kubernetes for AI deployments.
“The cloud-native community has a new infrastructure challenge: giving agents secure environments in which to operate,” said Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation, in the announcement. “NVIDIA’s contribution of OpenShell to CNCF gives developers a shared foundation to build on and an opportunity to shape how agent security evolves.”