NVIDIA has contributed OpenShell, an open-source runtime for securing and governing autonomous AI agents, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a Sandbox project, the CNCF said Nov. 10 at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America. NVIDIA’s developer blog announced the same donation.
Why it matters: The project is meant to put policy-based limits on what AI agents can do — tools, data, networks, credentials and inference — in the infrastructure they run on, rather than trusting the agent itself. The CNCF said OpenShell is adopting Cedar, another CNCF project, as its policy language.
The foundation said core contributors from NVIDIA, Red Hat, Docker and Canonical have worked on OpenShell since its start, and that the project is moving from NVIDIA’s GitHub organization to a neutral one, ai-openshell. Red Hat CTO Chris Wright said bringing it to the CNCF “puts governance of the project in the hands of the community.” Linux Foundation CEO Jim Zemlin said the contribution “gives developers a shared foundation to build on.”
NVIDIA said hundreds of organizations have used OpenShell and that the project has received tens of thousands of contributions in less than a year. The company also said it is contributing to Agent Substrate, a Google-led CNCF Sandbox project for long-running agent workloads on Kubernetes, and announced NVIDIA Kubernetes Engine, Kubernetes Recipes and Snapshot as new pieces of its DSX AI Factory Platform. On Snapshot, NVIDIA said design partner Crusoe cut the time for a GLM-5.3 workload to become ready from about eight minutes to 31 seconds.