Red Hat and Nvidia expand their partnership to secure autonomous AI agents

Red Hat and Nvidia expand their partnership to secure autonomous AI agents

Red Hat Inc. today expanded its collaboration with Nvidia Corp. to help enterprises secure autonomous artificial intelligence agents, govern access to AI models and deploy workloads on Nvidia’s upcoming Vera Rubin data center infrastructure.

Announced at Nvidia’s GTC event in Berlin, the updates center on Red Hat AI Factory with Nvidia, combining agent runtime controls, model inference software and hardware support across hybrid cloud environments. Red Hat also said it’s working to integrate Nvidia’s OpenShell Reference Architecture into its AI platforms as a native capability.

The security approach addresses two risks: agents exceeding their authorized boundaries and attackers compromising agents through techniques such as prompt injection or supply chain attacks. The companies aim to place security controls outside the agent and, where appropriate, the host operating system as well.

“An agent shouldn’t enforce its own boundaries,” John Fanelli, vice president of enterprise software at Nvidia, said in a statement. “Those controls belong outside the agent, in the runtime and the infrastructure beneath it.”

OpenShell provides a sandbox runtime for agents. Beneath that software layer, Nvidia’s Sentry security framework runs on the company’s BlueField data processing units, using its DOCA Argus software to monitor workloads from a separate hardware security domain.

In an accompanying technical blog, Red Hat said Argus inspects selected host memory structures to observe processes, files and network activity without requiring monitoring software on the host. An integrated security system can use its alerts to trigger BlueField policies that isolate an affected workload.

The architecture builds on existing BlueField-3 support in Red Hat OpenShift 4.22. It separates AI workloads running on server CPUs from networking and security services running on BlueField’s Arm processors. When configured to restrict host access, that separation helps protect infrastructure controls even if an attacker compromises the host.

Red Hat says Sentry can quarantine a compromised agent in milliseconds. Moving monitoring and networking functions onto the data processing unit also reduces demands on host CPUs, leaving more capacity for AI workloads.

Model controls

The partnership also addresses the model infrastructure agents need to reason and act. A joint reference design combines Model-as-a-Service access controls and an AI Gateway with inference technologies including vLLM, llm-d, Nvidia Dynamo and Nvidia NIM microservices.

Based on Nvidia’s Inference Hub reference design, it supports self-service model discovery, access policies, rate limits and subscription entitlement tracking. Separating access governance from model execution is intended to help enterprises manage quotas, attribute costs and maintain performance across hybrid environments.

The companies also announced joint support for Nvidia Nemotron models, including Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, in the vLLM inference and serving engine and Red Hat AI Factory with Nvidia. Red Hat highlighted quantization and speculative decoding techniques intended to reduce inference latency while preserving accuracy.

For hardware deployment, Red Hat said its Enterprise Linux for Nvidia now supports Vera CPUs and is prepared for the Vera Rubin platform. The companies are targeting operating system and platform compatibility when the new hardware becomes available.

An accompanying operating system blog explained that RHEL for Nvidia 26.03 modifies a limited set of core packages to accommodate new hardware while retaining standard RHEL userspace and security controls, including Security-Enhanced Linux. Users can transition to mainline RHEL without reinstalling once the hardware patches mature and enter the upstream Linux kernel.

Red Hat said the joint use cases, reference designs and agent capabilities are available through partners including Cisco Systems Inc., Dell Technologies Inc. and Lenovo Group Ltd., while work continues on native OpenShell integration.

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