Nvidia Splits AI Agent Safety Into 2 Silicon Layers

Nvidia spent the past year watching AI agents wander off script. An agent granted read access to a file share that quietly escalated into write access. A coding assistant that phoned home to an unapproved endpoint. A browsing agent that clicked through a CAPTCHA-bypass chain nobody authorized. Each incident produced the same postmortem: the software guardrails around the agent existed, but the agent itself, or the layer just beneath it, was compromised enough to route around them. On September 28, 2026, Nvidia concluded that the fix could not live entirely in software, and rolled out a platform designed to enforce agent boundaries in silicon instead.

The announcement, the Nvidia Open Agent Safety Platform, pairs a software runtime called OpenShell with a hardware watchdog called Sentry that runs on…