Summary
Lenovo says its Hybrid AI Factory solutions will support NVIDIA’s Open Agent Safety Platform, an open reference design for governing AI agents across software and infrastructure. The design combines an agent runtime with a separate watchdog on NVIDIA BlueField-4 data processing units.
Lenovo said on 28 September 2026 that it is working with NVIDIA to support the NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform, an open reference design for security and governance across the software and infrastructure used by AI agents. Lenovo says the support will be part of its Hybrid AI Factory solutions, with components intended for cloud, hybrid, on-premises and air-gapped environments.
AI agents can carry out tasks by interacting with software, systems and data. That makes controlling what an agent is allowed to access and do an infrastructure concern as well as a model-level one. Lenovo describes the NVIDIA design as using a zero-trust approach: access is restricted by default, with permissions and controls intended to set enforceable boundaries around agent activity.
A runtime paired with an independent watchdog
The design combines NVIDIA OpenShell, a secure runtime that governs agent execution, access and inference routing, with NVIDIA Sentry, a separate watchdog that monitors activity and enforces security policies. A runtime is the software environment in which a program operates; here, OpenShell is intended to manage how an agent runs and what resources it can use.
Lenovo says Sentry runs out of band on NVIDIA BlueField-4 data processing units (DPUs). A DPU is a processor designed to handle infrastructure tasks such as data movement and security functions. Keeping monitoring separate from the agent’s own runtime is intended to give policies an enforcement point outside the agent itself. Lenovo says Sentry can enforce policies in silicon and quarantine agents in milliseconds.
The reference design is intended to give organisations more control over how agents interact with their systems, applications and data, while allowing flexibility across models and deployment environments. An open reference design provides a technical blueprint for implementation; Lenovo’s announcement describes support for the design, rather than a specific customer deployment.
Where Lenovo plans to support it
Lenovo says its Hybrid AI Factory solutions will support OpenShell running on NVIDIA Vera CPUs and other processor platforms, and NVIDIA Sentry running on BlueField-4. The announcement positions this work within Lenovo’s Hybrid AI Advantage with NVIDIA portfolio and its broader commitment to industry cooperation on AI security.
The practical significance is the attempt to extend governance beyond model behaviour to the infrastructure where agents execute and access resources. Lenovo frames this as a way to build security and customer control into deployments across different environments. Its announcement does not provide a schedule for when this support will be available.