NVIDIA launches OpenShell Reference Architecture at GTC Berlin: Vera Rubin, Vera CPUs and BlueField-4 Sentry for hardware-enforced safe AI agents
At GTC Berlin on Oct 21, NVIDIA announced the OpenShell Reference Architecture: building on the open-source OpenShell secure runtime, it pairs Vera Rubin for inference, Vera CPUs for agent harnesses, and BlueField-4 DPUs running NVIDIA Sentry for in-silicon policy enforcement, so enterprises can build, contain, observe and govern agents on-prem and at the edge. NVIDIA says it is available now; partners named include Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft and ServiceNow. The software is Apache 2.0.
Key Takeaways
- Full stack: Vera Rubin for model inference, Vera CPUs for agent harnesses/tool use, BlueField-4 + Sentry for in-silicon policy and quarantine (vendor claims)
- Vendor claims: Vera Rubin NVL72 about 30x throughput per megawatt on agentic workloads; Sentry can quarantine a boundary-breaking agent in milliseconds and boost agent capacity by up to 20%
- Runtime: deny-by-default, enforcement outside the agent process; sandboxes have no direct network, syscalls are filtered in-kernel, credentials are injected only onto allowed requests
- Stated agent paths include Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot CLI, OpenCode, OpenClaw, LangChain Deep Agents; deploy with Docker, Podman or Kubernetes via Helm
- Start: curl install script then openshell sandbox create; docs at docs.nvidia.com/openshell; GitHub NVIDIA/OpenShell (Apache 2.0) and PyPI package openshell
Linked Models & Agents:
