CrowdStrike and NVIDIA have expanded their collaboration to protect AI agents from software all the way down to the hardware itself: the Falcon platform will integrate with OpenShell, NVIDIA’s secure execution environment, and later with Sentry, which enforces security policies directly on BlueField-4 DPUs. The announcement was made on October 21, 2026, at GTC Berlin. The OpenShell integration starts now; the Sentry integration is planned, with no date set.
CrowdStrike and NVIDIA on agent security in 20 seconds
- CrowdStrike will connect Falcon Guardian with OpenShell to monitor what AI agents do.
- Later it will integrate Sentry, which enforces policies on NVIDIA’s BlueField-4 DPUs.
- The idea is to detect and isolate a runaway agent from outside its own environment.
- Neither company has given dates or pricing for the Sentry integration.
Falcon Guardian is CrowdStrike’s AI detection and response (AIDR) solution, which monitors how models and agents deployed within a company behave. The announcement comes the same day NVIDIA unveiled its OpenShell reference architecture, a complete design for running AI agents with security boundaries at every layer, of which CrowdStrike is one of the partners.
What CrowdStrike Integrates at Each Layer
According to CrowdStrike’s announcement, the integration with OpenShell, NVIDIA’s open-source secure execution software, will connect agents’ prompts, their interactions with models, and their runtime activity with the Falcon platform’s security context, to detect malicious behavior. The second phase, with Sentry, will combine that detection with out-of-band monitoring and policy enforcement in silicon, so that an insecure agent can be detected and contained beyond its software environment.
Sentry is NVIDIA’s security framework that runs on BlueField-4 DPUs, the data processing units installed in servers to offload networking, storage, and security. According to NVIDIA information reported by StorageNewsletter, it monitors agent behavior from outside their own environment and, if one tries to step outside its software boundaries, quarantines it within milliseconds. NVIDIA first laid out the idea in September, when cloudnews.tech reported that NVIDIA wanted to put physical limits on AI agents with OpenShell and Sentry.
NVIDIA’s Architecture and Its Partners
NVIDIA’s OpenShell architecture is organized into several layers: Vera Rubin systems to run the models, Vera CPUs for the agents’ environments and tools, the OpenShell software as the execution boundary, and BlueField DPUs with Sentry for monitoring and control. CrowdStrike isn’t alone: Cisco, Check Point, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, Okta, and Microsoft, among others, are also integrating OpenShell into their agent security products, and banks such as BBVA and Santander are evaluating the architecture, according to NVIDIA.
In the announcement, Daniel Bernard, CrowdStrike’s chief business officer, argues that AI agents have already created a new attack surface and that guardrails alone won’t stop an adversary. Justin Boitano, NVIDIA’s vice president of enterprise, contends that securing agents in production requires protection from the runtime environment all the way to the infrastructure. The announcement also includes a statement from Autodesk, whose head of trust, Sebastian Goodwin, explains that Falcon Guardian gives them visibility into what their agents are doing.
What’s Available and What Isn’t
It’s worth separating what’s immediate from what’s planned. The OpenShell integration is the part CrowdStrike places in the present; the Sentry integration on BlueField-4 is described as planned, with no timeline or pricing, and the announcement itself includes the usual forward-looking-statements caveat. To take advantage of the hardware side, companies will also need NVIDIA infrastructure with BlueField-4 DPUs, something not every organization deploying agents has today.
The move reflects where AI agent security is heading: from relying on filters and rules within the model itself to adding external controls the agent can’t disable, an idea shared by several recent projects, from kernel-level confinement to monitoring from the network card.
Frequently Asked Questions
What have CrowdStrike and NVIDIA announced?
The integration of Falcon Guardian, CrowdStrike’s AI security solution, with NVIDIA’s OpenShell execution environment and, later, with Sentry on BlueField-4 DPUs.
What is NVIDIA Sentry?
A security framework that runs on BlueField-4 DPUs, monitors AI agents from outside their environment, and enforces policies in hardware, according to NVIDIA.
When will the Sentry integration be available?
There’s no date yet. CrowdStrike presents it as planned and hasn’t given a timeline or pricing.
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