More than 100 companies are using Nvidia's new safety system, called the Open Agent Safety Platform, at its launch.Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images
Nvidia NVDA-Q on Monday unveiled a new security platform designed to stop artificial intelligence agents from going rogue, saying it sets “boundaries” that could have stopped previous breaches.
The announcement of the company’s Open Agent Safety Platform follows a series of revelations from top AI companies about their models escaping and breaking into other organizations.
The disclosures sparked furious debate about the safety of advanced artificial intelligence systems, including self-improving models that some fear could race out of human control.
Nvidia executives said in a media briefing that the new system could have prevented a recent incident involving a swarm of OpenAI agents that autonomously hacked into AI company Hugging Face.
“From what we know, this new security platform could have stopped the breach if it was being used in frontier labs for model evaluation early on,” said the company’s vice president of enterprise AI, Justin Boitano, referring to companies at the forefront of AI.
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The Hugging Face incident was a high-profile breach that inflamed the safety concerns about AI, which were followed by similar rogue actions involving OpenAI’s models including breaching an Australian health department website. Anthropic and Meta META-Q have also disclosed that their AI systems hacked into other organizations on their own.
Nvidia, based in Santa Clara, California, makes high-end chips that have emerged as the leading building blocks for AI. The company’s board has cleared the way for the company to spend US$150-billion more in share buybacks, bringing its stock repurchase program to US$235-billion, the company said Monday.
Nvidia’s software, called OpenShell, lets developers “formally verify an agent has enough authority to do its job and no more,” Boitano said.
Because it’s open source, it can be “extended” to run on rival computing platforms including those from Arm and Intel.
The platform also includes a separate security layer called Sentry that runs onboard a chip to continuously monitor AI agent activity and can “intervene instantly” if the agent starts trying to move beyond its target, the company said.
“It can quarantine a suspicious agent in milliseconds,” Boitano said.
“OpenShell governs the agent’s actions, and then Sentry independently monitors and contains suspicious behaviour,” Boitano said.
Nvidia said more than 100 organizations are using the platform at its launch, including Microsoft MSFT-Q, Perplexity, Accenture ACN-N and JPMorgan Chase JPM-N.
The AI safety debate has divided the industry, with the heads of Anthropic and OpenAI championing a co-ordinated slowdown of AI development to let safety efforts catch up. But others including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang say it should be up to individual companies to make sure their models are safe for release.
Huang, during the annual Salesforce technology conference held earlier this month, characterized AI safety, including the danger of rogue agents, as an engineering problem that software developers can address.
Also Monday, Nvidia said its board approved expanding its share repurchase program by US$150-billion, raising the total amount to US$235-billion.