NVIDIA Launches OpenShell Reference Architecture to Contain and Police Enterprise AI Agents

NVIDIA on Wednesday announced the NVIDIA OpenShell Reference Architecture at GTC Berlin. It is a full-stack design for building, containing, observing and enforcing safe AI agents on enterprise infrastructure and edge systems.

It extends NVIDIA's open source OpenShell secure runtime software into what the company calls industrial-scale infrastructure for developing and running agents.

Three layers: think, act, govern
The architecture has three layers:
Vera Rubin runs model inference, for both closed models and open models built with NVIDIA Nemotron. For agentic workloads, NVIDIA says Vera Rubin NVL72 systems deliver 30x higher throughput per megawatt.
Vera CPUs run the agent harnesses and tool use, along with OpenShell, which sets a secure runtime boundary for autonomous agents. NVIDIA claims Vera CPUs deliver 2x the performance of x86 processors with greater energy efficiency.
BlueField-4 DPUs run NVIDIA Sentry, a security framework built on NVIDIA DOCA. It monitors agent behavior continuously and out-of-band, with in-silicon policy enforcement. If an agent tries to move outside its software boundary, Sentry quarantines and stops it in milliseconds. NVIDIA says Sentry also boosts agent capacity by up to 20%.

The design extends to the edge with NVIDIA RTX Spark, DGX Spark and DGX Station systems. NVIDIA lists retail, healthcare, manufacturing, robotics, software development and telecommunications as target industries.

"AI capability and safety must advance together," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "As enterprises prepare to deploy billions of AI agents, safety and control must be built into the computing architecture. With the OpenShell Reference Architecture, agents can think on Rubin, act on Vera and be governed on BlueField."

Ecosystem
Operating systems include Linux and Kubernetes infrastructure from Canonical, SUSE and Red Hat, and Microsoft Windows via Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC). Clouds include AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Enterprises can run agents from Anthropic, Cohere, Google, Meta, OpenAI, Perplexity, Reflection and SpaceX Super Intelligence on OpenShell infrastructure. Security vendors including 1Password, Check Point, CrowdStrike, Cisco, F5, Fortinet, Microsoft, Okta, Palo Alto Networks, TrendAI and Zscaler are integrating support into their agent security products. Europe's BBVA and Santander are exploring the architecture with NVIDIA. System makers including Dell Technologies, Cisco, HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro, and cloud providers including CoreWeave, Crusoe, Firebird, Firmus, GMI Cloud, IREN, Lambda, Nebius, Nscale, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Vultr, are working with NVIDIA on OpenShell-ready infrastructure.

The NVIDIA OpenShell Reference Architecture is now available.