Singapore – SAP and NVIDIA are deepening their collaboration to make enterprise AI agents safer, more governable and easier to audit, with SAP embedding NVIDIA’s open-source OpenShell runtime within SAP Business AI Platform.
The announcement, made on 28 September, coincides with NVIDIA’s unveiling of its Open Agent Safety Platform and the broad availability of OpenShell, according to SAP.
OpenShell is an open-source secure runtime for autonomous AI agents. SAP first outlined plans to combine it with SAP Business AI Platform at SAP Sapphire earlier this year, and says the work goes beyond a planned integration to a shared effort to define what “enterprise-grade” means for autonomous AI systems.
Under the co-development programme, SAP engineers are contributing directly to the OpenShell codebase while embedding the runtime in the platform. Joule Studio, SAP’s AI-first development environment, provides an execution and governance stack for enterprise agents, while OpenShell supports deploying them with a focus on safety and security, the company says.
The two layers handle different tasks. Joule Studio runtime helps determine whether an action should execute at all, applying business authorisation, role-based policy and process context before a request reaches the runtime, according to SAP.
OpenShell then governs how an agent executes, what it can see and do, and where inference goes. SAP says the combination is intended to give enterprise customers execution containment and business accountability in a single integrated stack.
Beyond the integration, the companies are working to harden the OpenShell runtime for enterprise-scale deployment. That includes regulated industries with strict security and compliance requirements, SAP says.
They also plan to connect OpenShell’s runtime isolation with the business governance layer of Joule Studio runtime. As a result, technical execution boundaries would link to enterprise authorisation models, identity and access management (IAM) frameworks and audit trails.
On compliance, SAP and NVIDIA are working toward FedRAMP, FIPS and regulated-industry enablement on a committed road map. Separately, both companies are founding members of the Open Secure AI Alliance, through which they aim to advance open research and AI safety.
On the engineering side, SAP is contributing to four areas of the OpenShell project. In platform architecture, it has helped drive the decomposition of the runtime into independently deployable components, separating the supervisor and agent execution layers so they can scale independently.
For Kubernetes-native operations, SAP’s contributions include operator support, image pull secret management for private container registries, custom volume claim templates and foreground deletion of sandbox resources. The company has also worked to minimise the gateway image footprint and extend compute driver support for heterogeneous enterprise infrastructure.
Finally, SAP has contributed to supervisor health monitoring and structured log-level configuration, which it says brings the runtime to enterprise observability standards.
