# Nvidia donates ‘extremely critical’ OpenShell to CNCF > Source: > Published: 2026-11-11 01:06:23+00:00 SALT LAKE CITY – Nvidia donated its OpenShell security platform to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a move that garnered a steady run of positive commentary from the cloud-native community at this week’s KubeCon+CloudNativeCon event in Salt Lake City. Nvidia [unveiled OpenShell at its GTC event](https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/nvidia-goes-all-in-on-agents-at-gtc-with-toolkits-openclaw-models/) earlier this year, positioning the platform as a way to enforce policy-based security, network, and privacy guardrails for agents at the system layer. The concept was later expanded to provide boundaries for agents executing tasks across both open and closed models while also forming a central part of the company’s community-based [Open Agent Safety platform](https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/nvidia-ropes-in-100-strong-posse-to-leash-rogue-ai-agents-after-openais-walkabout/) launched in the wake of several rogue agent incidents from the likes of OpenAI. That platform now sits within the CNCF “[Sandbox](https://www.cncf.io/sandbox-projects/)” community, which is the entry level for platform submissions into the CNCF ecosystem. The project will be open to contributors that can build upon the initial platform, with those updates fed back into the project. “The contribution gives developers, platform teams, and security practitioners a direct role in shaping the runtime foundation for AI and addresses the security, control, and governance challenges that stand between experimentation and production,” CNCF noted in a statement on the donation. Justin Boitano, VP and GM for enterprise computing at Nvidia, during a video presentation at this week’s event explained that OpenShell’s capabilities “should be open, vendor neutral, and governed by this community. “Developers and companies are working together to define its interfaces, build extensions, test its boundaries, and shape its future,” Boitano continued. “Try OpenShell. Integrate it in your infrastructure. Test it with your agents. Contribute what you learn. Every advancement in AI safety gives us the confidence to put agents to work on more ambitious problems. I look forward to what we build today.” ## OpenShell ‘is extremely critical’ Nvidia’s donation was one of many made this week at the event, including others from Nvidia, but was notable for the amount of positive commentary it generated from speakers. CNCF Executive Director Jonathan Bryce during a press conference said the project itself quickly gained attention, with people “proactively reaching out to me and going, ‘hey, what's happening with this OpenShell project? Are you aware of it? Do you know what their plans are for it?’ “It was actually several folks at neocloud companies because they are on the frontier of seeing how these models and these agents are running,” Bryce continued. “They're at the frontier of seeing where there are risks and challenges, and they are very ready to come together and build a solution that the entire industry and all of us can benefit from.” Bryce added that, “OpenShell is, I think, going to be one of the most important projects of this year because it's really going head-on at this idea of can we ever trust an agent.” That positioning is based on OpenShell being “several pieces working together to create a closed by default shell wrapper around an agent,” Bryce explained. “And you then apply policies after the fact to determine what is able to be done. Whether that's, can it access the network at all? Can it access certain properties? Can it access certain protocols? Can it only egress and not ingress? It's very powerful, very flexible, but it starts from a standpoint of I don't trust this agent to do anything, and that's a really good place to start when we don't totally understand how an agent's going to act on a on a continual basis. So … OpenShell is extremely critical.” While OpenShell will initially sit within [CNCF’s Sandbox tier](https://contribute.cncf.io/projects/lifecycle/), Bryce noted the project has already garnered considerable support showing the power of the open-source ecosystem. “What we have just seen over and over again is that open always wins with these kinds of problems in the end, and I think the fact that OpenShell already has 380 companies contributing to it, that's the sign of a project that has a really significant start and is going to solve real problems for a lot of people more so than something that's just a single vendor,” Bryce said.