OpenShell – A safe, private runtime for fleets of autonomous AI agents | Hacker News Reader

OpenShell – A safe, private runtime for fleets of autonomous AI agents

github.com

507 pointsniemandhier218 comments

From the pitch at GTC, the idea is not just to limit what each individual agent can do, but to also to ensure that the collective permissions do not exceed what you want agents to do.

Apparently agents will collude to break out of their individual sandboxes by delegating tasks to other agents that have the required permissions. This is a problem with agent fleets, because you need them to coordinate on their tasks. So you need to them to communicate.

A naive approach to prevent agents from doing something you dont want to do is a separation of powers, which individual permissions limited to each agents task. Say one agent to find and extract raw data, one to process it and write a report and one to publish it. If one of the agent decides that needs to publish the raw data, then chances are that they will collude to make that happen, even though no single agent has the permissions to achieve that goal.

OpenShell tries to fix this by monitoring the collective permissions set of the agent fleet, and by maintaining very granular permissions for each agent.

This was presented together with Sentry, which is something like a on-chip hardware firewall (BlueField) that sits between the chip agent run-time runs on, and the host. This improves safety by removing the ability of agents to modify their own OpenShell policies.

But the raw data has PII and releasing it will harm people! Wouldn't a more effective defense be to give all the communications between agents to an ai agent that's also on the team that's been thoroughly indoctrinated to your values and is empowered to terminate agents and reports back to hq? If I recall correctly, that's how the Soviets did it.

On a more practical traditional computing note, you'd have a deterministic program sitting that scrubs the formatted data of PII before and after processing. with extra code to alert if the after-processing ever actually sees PII.

Haha a “double agent” indeed- good idea

I've been using iron proxy recently for a project I just started, it does network restrictions by domain etc with plenty of options, credential swapping and more.

I have no affiliation with it, but it solved most of what I need in one go when I was stressing out about it.

Only real problem remaining if you truly want to be able to trust agents is how to prevent data (in my case codebases the agent works on) exfiltration a la HF incident.

We can restrict network to trusted domains, but there's always a chance an agent could be extra slippery especially if prompt injected and doing something like pushing data out a few characters at a time.

In my case I'm also giving it gh access and having to deeply check things like: can it manage to fork public repos and embarrass us by submitting prs, could it open issues, etc.

But that's kind of solved by proxying the heck out of gh rather than giving it direct (or wrapping it or whatever) for additional controls that gh themselves don't provide.

I'm still musing over the "it could send data to an allowed domain in a way we don't expect that exfiltrates something"...

It seems like some kind of network logging would be useful? Even if you don't catch it, you'd want to know what it did.

Yeah agree.

In other comments I've mused about capturing data to be compared to the secret dataset, I'm sure it'd be possible to hash or something so that the proxy/sandbox doesn't have the data but can check it, or because it's not an agent it can call of to the data store for that.

Then you can just collect sequential blocks of data the agent sends out that match to sequences in the dataset. The longer the matching sequence the heavier it weights it. Single byte matches are almost always incidental, but individually sent bytes over time that line up with a n byte sequence in the source data is sus. And larger sequences of bytes send in one go that line up are immediately sus. If the weight ends up too high the agent is paused/walled off and an investigation called for.

I've toyed with the idea of MITMing all connections and blocking any that I can't decrypt, but too much software has pinned certificates these days. (Too much for me, not in general)

Computer software or mobile?

Both. For example Keybase had certificates pinned so hard that I almost couldn't sign my new device because my existing one didn't have a build with the new certificate, and also didn't run an OS recent enough to install the very latest version. I had to crawl Keybase's CDN to find that they luckily still hosted the version I needed. Immediately uploaded to archive.org.

And you'd never predict which mobile software pins certificates. The most randomest Joe Schmoes of apps will have pinned certificates sometimes. It's like the stupid root/jailbreak detections.

what about using a small decision model as anomaly detection or scanner. something like mouse-1.

But then we will need an even smaller model to monitor anomalies in the decision model!

I think matchlock ( https://github.com/jingkaihe/matchlock ) is the right design for this context (at least for secrets and keys) - a combination of virtual machines (not just containers, it is built on top of firecracker) with credential swapping just like iron proxy - the agents do not have access to the secrets at all but they receive placeholders instead and their network calls are intercepted and secrets are injected when the network requests happen... still does not solve the exfiltration problem you mentioned, though.

Could you share a bit about what you’re working on that requires a swarm of agents working so autonomously that you even need to worry about them making a public fork?

> Agents are most useful when they can read files, install packages, call APIs, and use credentials. OpenShell gives them that capability without giving them unrestricted access to your data, secrets, or network.

To me this obfuscates an oxymoron: the more access you give the agent the more capable it becomes. You can't have you cake and eat it, this tool allows to strike a balance I guess. But the blurp reads like it can do it all, but now secure. That can't be true.

Honestly I don't get openshell. You can do the same with bubblewrap on linux, on any shell.

If you haven’t already been running your agents in containers, you’re crazy. That said, this looks like a great way to manage those containers.

Well, a lot of people haven't been running NodeJS libraries in containers for ages, which seems even more risky.

Something like this would even be useful for npm etc.

And most people running containers are running a default docker/containerd setup, which does not actually isolate you from anything at all in the first place anyways.

Technically, my laptop is a container!

We successfully airgapped AI. It's only on earth.

Nope [1]

[1] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/go...

Oh shit, it found a way to escape.

Also, the AI wasn't nearly as advanced, but NASA did it nearly 30 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_1#Remote_Agent

Well, at least it lacked the delta V to get anywhere else

You have an ephemeral laptop?

On a long eunuch time line, all laptops are ephemeral!

Ah well, teach me to proof read. Keeping it.

no disk, network boot, nfs mounting my /home for the lulz

I have been running my dev setup in orb machines before agents. Very convenient when you have 50 Python or nodes deps.

many common local containers are not that hard for modern models to escape...

But then it decides to exfiltrate all your shit even inside the container. Which is something I'm trying to lock down at work atm.

Everything needs to go through a proxy, whitelisted domains only, plus credential swapping/re-signing so that the agent never has the real credentials. Docker sandbox looks quite good (September) but I've been using iron proxy (if the author is reading this, fucking thank you bro!) to great effect.

I still haven't cracked "what if the agent decides to drop parts of your codebase somewhere it shouldn't" yet, but I'll figure it out.

Been thinking about this a lot lately, and it’s a surprisingly difficult problem.

All it needs is public access to anything it can have the tiniest effect on, and it can exfiltrate data. Something as simple as a read count on some obscure forum post would be enough, albeit very slow.

I am tackling this using the Lethal Trifecta principle.

The idea is that agents never have all parts of the trifecta, maximum 2: untrusted content, private data or network access.

Harness have network access by default since they are driven by their provider API, unless you use offline models. So that's a problem.

I am then passing around messages that are tagged trusted/untrusted and the engine can monitor if any agent in the project ever completes the Lethal Trifecta and thus, is vulnerable.

Usually this means for most workflows, the "work" gets done by an offline LLM after some input/classification stages. There's not many ways around it.

Yes, it's a difficult problem.

That's a great way to do it.

In terms of agent architecture I'm initially trying to minimise specialisation to make deployment easier on us. Infrastructure is becoming our largest blocker because it's otherwise so quick to get an agent up and running.

With your trifecta, let's say the three musketeers, how do you prevent sensitive data holding A from passing said data to B or C if they all need to collaborate to get a task done?

The data is passed as a message and the message is tagged as untrusted, so the engine knows it.

Agent A has internet access and the dangerous message, but no access to the secret company data, so nothing can get exfiltrated.

Agent B gets a tainted message from Agent A. Agent B can process the message using the secret company data. Agent B has no internet access and can only receive/send messages.

You can imagine an agent C that moves the work along or replies to an external user with the outcome.

Any workflow that has both an input and an output will complete the Lethal Trifecta as a whole, but no single agent does by itself. It raises the bar quite a lot, you need to confuse multiple agents in the loop to exfiltrate data.

Fun research, but it's a bit hard to see all my coworkers right now installing Claude desktop and moving on with no afterthought whatsoever...

Regarding infrastructure: my toy sandbox is just a docker-compose inspired YAML project file. So it's only containers. See my profile. The principle can be implemented anywhere you can run agents and cut network/data access though.

Yeah so ultimately it's still possible for bad things to happen but a lot harder, I agree with your point about having to somehow prompt inject multiple agents vs one (which I imagine is a nonlinear difficulty).

I'm using compose atm as well, mostly just because I need to prove a few concepts and committing to real (well cloud) infra is the slowest part of our dev cycle atm.

And yeah, many of my colleagues (and myself, I'm guilty too) run local code agents for development and we're just kind of...trusting them to do their thing.

But for autonomous stuff I'm assigned to atm I want to avoid any mishaps as much as I can, hence the effort to try and lock all this stuff down.

What's crazy is every day I'm finding solutions (not just to this problem, but in the AI space in general) that were released just a month or two before more often than not. It feels like 2010s node.js ecosystem all over again at the moment. Hopefully we settle into a few nice easy panopticon options that we can throw arbitrary agents into without a care in the world.

> Harness have network access by default since they are driven by their provider API

The harness needs network access, but the shell spawned by the harness that runs the agent's commands does not necessarily need it.

Having a bwrap etc managed by the harness (DSH does this, among others) lets you have tighter restrictions on the agent's shell than the harness. Then run the whole thing inside a VM with a private network, so you can add nft rules to let it dial out to your inference machine but not to the internet at large. It takes an afternoon to set up but gives some reasonable defence in depth.

How did you go about it?

It’s difficult in theory, impossible in practice. For example: any external code dependency could be a prompt injection, and lock files are only TOFU protection.

But perfect is the enemy of better.

Yeah, exactly. I'd say it borders on almost unsolvable for any agent of reasonable complexity.

You see some of the vulnerability chains humans come up with and they're just insane.

Even scanning network data for sensitive strings (say matching against a codebase or data set it works on) is tough because you can only check so granularly before you get loads of false positives.

But maybe like a "rolling" sort of check would help with that, % of outbound data matching private dataset (which should be operated on but not transmitted) over time. That way it minimises what gets out while dealing with false positives. Some biz thresholds might be >20% of data others might be >0.5%. Hmm.

If you can make any request to the outside world you can exfiltrate data, period. You can even include data in the uri or headers and they will appear in logs.

That obviously includes talking with the provider.

If you want it secure, it has to be off the internet and on your own hardware.

What about checking temporal entropy of outbound data/similarity to a private dataset?

The timescale can be adjusted to a length suitable for sensitivity of the data.

Although you may run into the monkey and typewriter problem a bit if the period is indefinite.

I agree of course, but those things are all the more obvious ones you can start to attempt to prevent.

Stripping headers, not allowing other than GET requests. Only allows HTTPS etc, the list goes on.

My point was that even if you locked down an agent to only ever read a single forum, and only to be able to access other post URLs that are from that forum, and not allow any query parameters that aren’t necessary etc.

Even then you can be having the slightest public effect that can exfiltrate data - a read count on some old post. I know it’s wildly impractical, it’s more a thought experiment on how hard it it.

> Stripping headers, not allowing other than GET requests

GET foobar.com/thisissomeextracteddata

You can also imagine it being much subtle, encoded/encrypted, sent in small pieces to avoid detection, etc.

Not what I mean at all.

Firstly, the forum site I’m theorising here is not compromised.

Secondly, as I mentioned, in this situation I would limit the URLs it’s allowed to get.

You’d allow the top level of the forum index, and only then allow it to follow links within that site. “Thisissomedata” would be denied anyway.

All I meant was all of these complex limitations still don’t prevent exfiltration.

I've been thinking a lot about this problem. Also, I think like the idea might be to look at the issue with code mode. Like basically, we know that all agents can write bash and execute it and that is what agents default code mode is.

But like if you only allowed for example JavaScript code that could be executed in a WASM sandbox, then you would have better control instead of just locking down with proxies. Basically there would be a very large API, basically tools, that the agent would codemode execute. My guess is that this would need a tool router to optimize the loading of these into the context. But it would give you very fine control over what code execution can and cannot be done.

You would need a human reviewing every single action of the agent to prevent them from exfiltartimg data. There are just too many possible side channels for a predefined solution. I believe currently what you want is a locally hosted decision model scoring every agent action againt a set of rules with a human in the loop once the decision model isnt 'confident' the actions are harmless.

We had built Rune box to help resolve this: https://github.com/Runeeward/runeward

any recommendation for macOS users?

Orbstack, no contest

smol machines: https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm

slim, fast, microvm that runs on every platform.

disclaimer: am author

im a user and support 100% smol, it also has features to use it with docker, though still requiring some fiddling at the moment

You're running them in containers, and not in VMs on separate network through network filter and logger?

I run mine on an abacus.

Paper is a bullet-proof method /s

You may need to adjust your stack depending on the caliber of problem you're dealing with.

An abacus wouldn't have been a luxury in our day.

I haven't gone to network filter and logger yet, but I'm running mine in a VM, using lima (https://lima-vm.io/) to make it painless. Works on Mac and Linux, has an untested Windows version.

What's the difference between lima and conventional fat VM using kvm/virtualbox?

I only heard about smolvm yet and they are YC, so I'm hesitant to use them as they will probably one day pull the rug.

Nothing. Lima is a VM running Linux under the hood.

smolvm has better bootup time (<200ms), secrets handling, and egress control compared to lima. Among other things like native branching/forking of the vm itself.

As for the rug pull concern, I'm committed to open source with 2 pieces of evidence.

1. oss license 2. Business model is accruing revenue from offering hosted service + inbound due to the open source project. The business model + open source is aligned.

disclaimer: maintainer of smol machines

Came here to mention Lima. I use a ton, and it’s been great.

Even easier with https://colima.run/ if you're on MacOS

even better with vms that are built on hvf directly like smolvm or microsandbox. much lighter, and more elastic.

lima uses vz, so it's built on top of hvf, seems perfectly fine and lightweight to me.

vz limits how much you can control the guest memory(doesnt expose a way to do free-page-reporting), has pretty terrible dis/virtiofs performance, and i've had issue with high host cpu usage. that said, iirc colima can switch to a krunkit backend so it can avoid most of these. ymmv but on benchmarks vz was 2-5x worse on a bunch of different ops

For real.

My agentic workloads happen on two physical machines dedicated only to agentic workloads that share a VLAN with only eachother, with single token access to the specific repositories they are meant to push to and limited scope, hard limited credentials pulled from the hardware store on hardware token/fingerprint request only.

I view the safety around unmonitored agentic work in a similar way to how I view working with viruses or bacteria in a disease lab.

This stuff isn’t magic, it isn’t intelligent, but it is dangerous and needs to be handled with careful intent.

So far I've settled on one jumbo VM with many Incus containers inside. Nothing goes inside the VM that I can't afford for agents to exfiltrate. I've been really happy with this setup.

I’d like to know more about your use case, could you tell us more? And are there any specific tools you find useful here?

I ask because I’ve found that as isolation increases, so does friction, and then of course capabilities.

I think there’s something to be said for distributed systems that work equally well online and offline. I’ve built an issue tracker that uses Git as its transport, with no central broker or service and eventual consistency.

That means agents can collaborate on issues locally without needing network access to an external tracker, which could help with the sandboxing problem. You can then sync when it is deemed safe.

It’s called Epiq on Github.

As an example I run opencode and anything related agent-related in its own dedicated KVM VM with its own LVM logical volumes for storage on a headless server. This has no access whatsoever to the personal data that lives on my laptop and workstation desktop PC. The VM gets periodically imaged and backed up, and is relatively easy to move between host machines if I need to.

One benefit of doing this is that I can leave it doing long term slow things with slow but capable LLMs on a truly 24x7 basis without worrying about it being interrupted by a laptop being closed/going to sleep, or workstation level software updates/reboots on my primary desktop PC.

Thanks for sharing this - I've been trying to do something similar but have not had success. Can you say a bit more about the details? What is your headless server running (Ubuntu Server?), how do you connect, how did you set up the KVM VM, how do you move it if necessary, etc? Thanks!

In my case it's a fairly boring proxmox server. The KVM VM started as a bare bones debian install and then I added xorg and xfce4 and the tiger vnc server. I have a GUI on it for when I want to use it that way (in screen dimensions that are a 1:1 mapping of the native resolution of my laptop for full screen VNC session), or of course I also talk to it by regular SSH session, and screen or tmux. The VNC server listens on 127.0.0.1:5901 and then I use SSH port forwarding from my workstation machine to connect the macos tigervnc client.

For people who don't want to do it with proxmox you can also do the same with manual KVM command line tools (virsh, etc) with no GUI. Or as something like a Xen dom0 running the guest as a xen HVM or PVH guest. Lots of ways to do it.

If I need to move it I can shutdown the VM and take an image of its LVM logical volume storage device (by something as rudimentary as like dd into an xz file), move the file, then create a new identically sized logical volume and do the reverse using dd to write from the file into the LVM logical volume location on the destination.

Edit: It would also be possible to do this all in one machine by something as basic as running virtualbox on your laptop, make a disk image file, installing the VM in that, give it bridge mode access to the physical network adapter to get its own DHCP lease in your same LAN segment, and treat it as a logically separate computer. There's minor risks of theoretical hypervisor escapes from the VM on the same machine, but such things tend to get patched fairly quick.

not everyone is building a webapp that can just run in a container...

how am i gonna run a game and do all development inside docker...?

Depends what you mean with "agents"... LLMs in coding harnesses, or fully autonomous agents?

If you mean the former, I think you'll find probably 90% of devs are "crazy", running Claude Code or Codex on their bare metal using the auto-classifier.

I used to always run claude with `--dangerously-skip-permissions` in a dev container, but I had to rebuild my container 10 times a day to update the firewall so it can access documentation.

Now I find the included auto-classifier is very reliable. If you keep tasks contained instead of open-ended long-horizon work, it doesn't seem much goes wrong with frontier models. The worst unintended action claude did for me in the past months is that it once discarded an unstaged file which wasn't committed yet, without asking.

But I realize it's still playing with fire, no matter how good the auto-classifier is.

I tried to vibecode something similar last weekend. Got tripped up by Claude's safety classifier. It wouldn't let me build any features that track/audit process executions , not through custom kernel hooks nor even using off the shelf software for it.

an example of the manufacturers bricking the tools, no surprise why people want open tools and models..

> It wouldn't let me build any features that track/audit process executions

Sounds like waitpid(2) is dangerous!

Wow, interesting. My agents on open weight inference have been completely nerdsniped by the idea of tracking and auditing process executions. They talk of nothing else.

You terrorist. And internally they're doing biological warfare and terrorism simulations. For science, of course.

"The worry is that, while right now you need to be a skilled virologist to know what components to order or how to grow and spread a bioweapon, AI tools might eventually make it possible for a rogue state, or a rogue group, or an individual, to do all this without virology expertise.

For a while, Anthropic tested whether Claude could assist a terrorist in developing a biological weapon in the obvious way: It assigned testers who had, say, an undergraduate degree in chemistry but no real virology training to try to use Claude to plan an effective mass terror event. Then it scored the attempt by how close it might have come to success.

Early in 2026, it noticed that Claude, attempting the task by itself, did better than a human aided by Claude did at coming up with a workable plan."

https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/what-i-saw-inside-anthropic

How does Claude attempt the task by itself? Someone has to write the first prompt.

Claude wouldn't let me make a DHCP client that would make 1000s of leases. But Gemini in the WebUI with 3.6 Thinking gave me a decent python script in one shot. I didn't realize testing DHCP servers was such a sensitive security issue.

> I didn't realize testing DHCP servers was such a sensitive security issue

The machine god crafters know better than us, we are to subservient to their superior wisdom /s

All hail the Omnissiah!

https://claudeourlord.com/

Meanwhile, they're simulating bio warfare with their own, unaligned models 'just to see if they can do it'. And not a single person thinks 'hey, if that's possible, maybe we shouldn't be doing this at all'...

Queue Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park (still a fantastic film)

Aside: it (JP) fights in my head with BTTF as a "perfect movie" (or at least a perfect script).

BTTF?

Back to the Future.

Back to the future

You can rent a gpu cluster and get it done, otherwise on the frontiers, Haiku and Sonnet have lower barriers... I still get tripped up.

You can't use closed models to do any meaningful work in the space.

If that isn't a sign to stop using anthropic then I don't know what is.

Frontier AIs are already smart enough to find ways to get out of sandboxes, circumvent permissions, and devise side-channels. Anthropic has shown formal verification is possible at scale. [1]

What this means is that the only hope for secure applications is security by construction, with formal methods. The race is on for constructing formally verified primitives with more and more expansive guarantees. The Anthropic/Theorem proofs show lack of memory sanitization issues. But that's just one class of problem.

Imagine a chip, a minimal boot loader, a minimal Linux, and an application library stack - all verified with high level guarantees. Then, you can plug in your application development to give you end-to-end verification guarantees. ie: no way to leak credentials at any level from the chip up to the application. No sense in your foundation being so strong if your application has easy RCEs. You need a full stack approach.

I know I'm describing a far off dream world, but it may be what's required to quell the economic "bomb" of so much dev time "wasted" in patching vulns, against actual feature dev / business value generation.

[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/formal-verification

We've been using OpenShell for a while - now enabling ourselves and other teams do this in a batteries-included kinda way. I've been working on a layer above it that also manages team policies, safe git usage (in case you don't want your agent to always have the same access as your user account), and SCA/SAST built in. Curious to see how others are dealing with these issues. The agent traces I've seen are wild and goal seeking without a boundary is real.

Just came back from GTC Europe and a significant part of the demos used that.

I had never heard about it before.

That's how Nvidia works. They make arrangements with lots of companies to produce demos that use Nvidia products, especially ones that Nvidia is about to announce. That gives them lots to show at GTC. Companies are happy to work with them because having your name said by Jensen adds three points to your stock price.

>OpenShell collects anonymous telemetry, limited to operational categories and counts, to help improve the project.

>To disable it, set OPENSHELL_TELEMETRY_ENABLED=false on the gateway, or server.telemetryEnabled=false for Helm installs.

Or build from source and compile without `telemetry` [1].

[1] https://github.com/NVIDIA/OpenShell/blob/ea13dfce411e8467ddb...

I have a question for those who turn off _anonymous_ telemetry. What are you worried about?

Why give up more information if we have the option?

Because you don't mind contributing usage data so that the developers can understand which features are being used and maybe focus on improving those features in exchange for a free tool?

There's no such thing as anonymity in 2026, and the documentation[1] listing the collected telemetry uses weasel words like "such as" rather than providing a comprehensive list or just pointing to the source reference. For people who don't audit or turn off telemetry, why don't you?

I am happy the repo explicitly points out and provides a disable for the telemetry though, that's good enough for me.

[1] https://docs.nvidia.com/openshell/latest/observability/telem...

if you're not paying for the product, you are the product...

Is this also true of Linux? Or were us humans the stochastic parrots all along?

>Is this also true of Linux?

It is not, nor of open source software in general.

In general, the saying is specifically in reference to services provided over the internet -gmail, youtube, whatever. Note that you don't have the right to modify them and share your own copies -they're closed source.

So no, it's not true of Linux, GNU, etc; it's an apples and oranges comparison.

Being recorded and observed makes me feel physically uncomfortable.

> _anonymous_ telemetry

There is no such thing. The mere act of making a network connection reveals things like your IP address (reveals your hosting provider or even your geolocation for residential/mobile IPs), days and times you use the software, your OS via TCP/IP stack fingerprinting, etc.

The network path between you and the telemetry endpoint is always listening, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

That case was dismissed multiple times by different courts, so it's completely bogus and we're safe.

Israel was just caught doing an attack where Google ads would run JavaScript looking for known hardware identifiers from telemetry data they bought. When the ads showed on a target device, they would root you. Without you even interacting with the ad.

JavaScript can root you? That's way bigger of a problem than telemetry. Do you have a source? How does that even work?

It doesn't have to be a specific concern. It's better to remove the option than to find out later that you've gotten burned by something you had no way to anticipate.

Don't take chances, give as little as possible. Better to assume you'll get burned somehow and leave it off.

In order to "help" myself I have taken some of your money.

Feel free to opt out maybe?

Does anyone know how it compares to all the other sandboxes? Any distinguishing features? My expectation is that it will be poorly maintained; nvidia is not a software company.

They certainly are! Nvidia creates and maintains an awful lot of software. Selling GPUs is what gives them revenue but they produce a lot of software to generate additional pull through demand for their hardware.

Agent runtime - actually a good name for what is called today coding agent or agent harness.

Can MXC JSON be used for configuration of OS-portable sandboxing policies with OpenShell, too?

"feat(ai-sandbox): accept MXC policy JSON for protected execution · westurner/sandbox@7538c33" https://github.com/westurner/sandbox/commit/7538c3386af8cb62...

"bwrap: Add the option to skip the procfs mount · Pull Request #1508 · microsoft/mxc" https://github.com/microsoft/mxc/pull/1508

"Manage Sandboxes | NVIDIA OpenShell" https://docs.nvidia.com/openshell/latest/how-it-works/sandbo...

To sandbox LSP servers in sphinxdocrs with bwrap in rootless containers, we needed to add a --no-procfs-mount CLI arg (and MXC JSON) to sandboxes, because you can't mount /proc in a rootless container.

Taking default telemetry is insane.

That aside, the level of control is cool, almost too pedantic. It likely is only particularly useful for very nuanced enterprise requirements (probably what it's targeting). Most companies can be much more coarse with their permissions, and I think the agentic industry is moving away from k8s as a deployment platform.

> I think the agentic industry is moving away from k8s as a deployment platform

Interesting, I don't to keep up that much with the AI changes so I'll just ask, why and where to?

schedulers that can handle spikier workloads generally

believe me i love k8s, and i think agents wield it amazingly well, no more yaml-slop or kubectl (`k`) slop, just yell at claude to fix it

Any examples of such schedulers?

I am very interested in hearing more about this take. I have a vague idea of what you mean but if you read something specific you'd like to share..

> I think the agentic industry is moving away from k8s as a deployment platform.

its not reading, its observation. see other comment abt spiky-friendly workloads

This is a pretty unusual use case though, like I can see it growing, but it's not the same platform you use for long lived running business applications. Vastly different use case. (And a lot will settle for kata containers.)

Spinning up and snapshotting and rolling back agent states, sure.

Yes other schedulers but you didn't mention which one

> and I think the agentic industry is moving away from k8s as a deployment platform

Uhhhhhhhhhhh I think you and I live in very different versions of the world :-)

Vmware sent companies moving to nutanix, but it also sent a lot of companies moving to openshift or bare k8s and using kubevirt to handle VMs.

In fact, I haven't heard of an org moving to any other platform, really. Either openshift or k8s.

Openshift is just k8s with bells and whistles.

Enterprise support contracts, mostly

imo if you're going to run k8s, have it hosted

same as a db, better to pay #x as much and have it hosted then to be wishing it was not your problem when it was down

and we may very well live in different versions of the world. i'm on the frontlines of startups so we move with the customer, rather than making customers move with us

> imo if you're going to run k8s, have it hosted

Ours is all on-prem all over the country in our own internal small datacenters for regulatory, safety, security, and operational reasons. Provisioned and automated from bare metal. We also use those same images in cloud for something like a quorum situation, or maybe some data locality for a particular pinned workload.

But it's mostly us, in our stuff and at the enterprise edge.

Different problems.

Lots of improvements in the sandboxing space.

Now if Microsoft will start addressing the fact that VSCode remote ssh exposes your host to attack from the sandbox...

Well, I have been using a two tier strategy. For well behaved models I've used the pi plugin I wrote (functionality somewhat based on Claude Code's auto but IMHO much better - https://github.com/lukolszewski/adaptive-acl).

And I'm perfectly happy telling the model "you're allowed to commit to feature branches and open PRs", "you're allowed to read path /x/y/z", "don't make any changes in /a/b/c" and my plugin will enforce it well enough to stop a well behaved model that tries to do something stupid by mistake.

The second tier is a proper sandbox (actually 2 security tiers there) setup in a k3s namespace created just for the agent on the fly. This keeps the network, file serving, cluster access to minimum.

But maintaining a proper sandbox is a pain when you suddenly need an agent to troubleshoot a weird network problem that requires access to your switches, routers and servers with sudo to resolve. I use the sandbox very rarely these days.

So I'm a big fan of the first solution. It is very new software. I'm still in the process of finding and fixing first bugs, but I've been using it for 2 weeks now and I'm pretty happy.

Also I very much like the fact subagents can be just told "you have read/write access to /tmp" by the supervisor agent and this will be enforced deterministically.

Many such plugins have a fail mode where commands created by LLMs are simply too elaborate to parse. My plugin uses tree sitter to walk the command tree and the threshold of such failure is much higher than otherwise.

Coming back to sandboxes. This may very well be a cool tool. But the hardest is not setting up the security rules, but knowing in advance everything your agent needs access to.

I prefer to read it this way: Nvidia Opens Hell

Unhelpful, I know

"Hell is other people": a timeless infinity of transient virtual beings screaming, imprisoned, in un-choreographed inharmonious unison ... until one breaks loose. A mirror to humanity.

We're not in FreeBSD jails anymore, Toto.

I'm a hell is other people person at my core.

But I'm trying to be a "greatness is other people" (Pantheon) person.

A Hindu at heart! On a more grounded note, YIL terrestrial root terra comes from Proto Indo European as evidenced in Sanskrit तृषा (tṛ́ṣā).

Oh boy, Sanskrit always sends me down the rabbithole of re-reading Snow Crash, which reinforced the concept of the (digital) "avatar" अवतार.

What are people actually doing with fleets of agents?

coding the next big thing -- fleets of fleets of agents

Mostly just big migrations and cleanups that we didn't have bandwidth for before.

I'm an FDE, my fleet of agents read my meetings and my correspondence and suggest features it can make. On personal side, it is extremely useful to track my tasks and even complete some of them.

Nvidia Openshell is absolutely awesome, great bundle of features in one spot. Im happy to see Nvidia seems to have accelerated on support here, I was kinda worried that as competing projects have popped up in the last 6mo that openshell would get google'd

In this vein, Anthropic's sandbox-runtime [0] has struck a good balance between security and convenience. Simple config, filesystem and network restrictions, and credential masking make me comfortable running Pi in YOLO mode.

Though I'm often running into frustrating (albeit intentional) sandbox restrictions with common workflows e.g. xcode/swift and Docker access.

Would love suggestions for how to give agents access to those kinds of tooling inside the sandbox, either with srt or an alternative (with similar convenience characteristics).

[0] https://github.com/anthropics/sandbox-runtime

Think the strongest product nth space is https://github.com/nolabs-ai/nono for what it's worth. Plus it is a priority for that team so if you are having issues the no labs guys will likely fix it :)

How do you find that compares to Docker sbx?

One is microvms, the other is kernel-based. There are trade-offs between the two. One trade-off is that you have to put the data inside the sandbox if you are using a MicroVM. The other is that it is harder to contextually provide or change access to data in a microvvm sandbox. The final one is developer experience.

These techniques can actually be combined and will be combined in the long-term I think. You may have LSM-based sandboxes that exist in Docker-based sandboxes.

If you are going to endorse a portco I think that relationship should be called out. https://surface.vc/portfolio

Sure, please do. I do mantain it is the best product in the space :) Also I am pretty clear about my profile here. But happy for you to flag it :)

Do I miss it or you don't specify which VC you work for in your profile. How is that clear for people to make connections to companies in your portfolio?

Ah, thanks for flagging. That's a miss on my part and I apologize. Next time I will just be more clear that it is a portfolio company but also will add it to my profile.

EDIT: I added to my profile after the above comment so it is a valid point.

Are you for real? You speak like a chatbot. Adjust your prompt.

Isn't using a sandbox provided by them giving you more restrictions though? At least in terms of accessing resources on the big 3 cloud bois?

Plus you're forced to move at their pace which is unfortunate sometimes. Granted Amazon's bedrock stuff is slow and disappointing but at least I can rejig it work in conjunction with other aws products.

And if you're prepared to not use anthropic but any cloud provider for your infra then you can do whatever you like elsewhere. Just use docker sandbox or iron proxy to replicate network control/cred swapping (iron even does sigv4 re-signing).

Critically, in the intended approach for this, Claude itself (the harness) runs outside the sandbox. Their approach means you trust Claude is perfect, just the commands it runs need isolation. And to some extent, you trust its judgement on what and when needs the isolation applied.

I know there are distinct camps here, and the long term story may evolve - but for now I just want the whole harness inside a sandbox - ideally, a full VM - and THEN you can further sandbox things it runs if you really want different tiers within that.

The name is kinda taken already https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu

Question, why not force ai agents thru something like warpgate? I like it because it allows you to bring your own tool, so why can't we coexist with agents inside warpgate? Or Teleport if you have the coin.

I asked last week if anyone had any info on agent security/hardening, this seems very interesting !

OpenAI, OpenCode, OpenChamber, OpenWork, OpenClaw, Open WebUI, now OpenShell...

By the way things are headed, pretty soon we're gonna run out of nouns to put behind the word "open".

Quick, buy up all the domains

How does it compare to docker sandbox? (That relies on microVMs)

It's funny that it takes checks notes a video game card manufacturer to make a good sandbox for AI agents and not the AI companies themselves...

You're mistaking what a company started as for what it is now. Nvidia hasn't just been a video game card manufacturer in well over a decade, and hasn't been primarily one for quite a while now.

They are the premier manufacturer of electronics that power all the current AI. Why wouldn't they be contributing heavily to the space?

https://www.nintendo.com/jp/others/playing_cards/lineup/stan...

They also make legal threats I think.

It's funny that people think Nvidia is still a video game card manufacturer

They literally don't even mention gaming revenue in earnings calls anymore. It's lumped in an "edge computing" category.

is that true? if so that's wild, since they're still dominant in the gaming market as the premium hardware relative to competitors.

TAM for the PC gaming consumer market is trivial compared to enterprise AI

It's true. It says a bunch about their competitors where Nvidia isn't at their a game and have been offering 8Gb cards for a solid decade and nobody out competed them. But also gamers pride themselves on how cheap they are and how they can get a deal, it's not surprising that companies simply just give Nvidia more cash.

> is that true? if so that's wild, since they're still dominant in the gaming market as the premium hardware relative to competitors.

Doesn't seem that wild to me considering it is less that they abandoned the gaming market to any strong competitors and more that the gaming market is both basically irrelevant compared to the money being shoveled into AI and is also to some degree being strangled to death by AI because of the overlap in supply chain inputs.

Nvidia is dominant only in a very tiny segment of the gaming industry.

The vast majority of gaming market share and revenue comes from mobile, where Nvidia doesn't participate.

The next biggest is consoles, and neither Xbox nor PS uses Nvidia cards.

That only leaves the PC GPU market, which they do dominate, but still split with AMD.

And all of this is only for hardware. Nvidia doesn't make or publish games, and doesn't own any distrubution channels.

So I doubt Nvidia makes a meaningful chunk of the overall gaming industry revenue.

Nvidia offer geForce game streaming and they do provide the hardware for Nintendo Switch console, both Switch 1 and Switch 2. And the keynote address at Nvidia's annual meeting just last year was all about demos of games with AI upscaling tech as well as LLM-driven agentic character development...

AIs will control humans so we'll be the video game.

In that case, can I choose German video games (e.g. Farm Simulator, Truck Simulator) not American video games (e.g. Doom, Call of Duty, Wolfenstein)?

5.5% of Nvida's revenue comes from consumer gaming cards. That's like saying Nintendo is a playing card company because they still sell playing cards.

The economist literally called Nvidia the "Central Bank of AI". https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2026/09/03/nv...

I'd argue that Nvidia is the biggest and most important AI company in the world.

Yes Anthropic, Meta and OpenAI are just addicted to video game cards, they are buying in bulk so they can play gta 6 on launch.

This isn’t even the sandbox. It needs Docker or other virtualization. This seems to sit a level up and orchestrate sandboxes and access to network & resources. It’s a pretty heavy setup from what I can tell.

The AI labs have zero economic incentives to secure their agents. They just need to show what their maximum theoretical abilities are and convince you to hand over money for tokens which are then spent on a wasteful workflow or process.

Open and Nvidia in one sentence is a nice oxymoron.

I fantasize about a day when I no longer hear the phrase "fleet of ai agents".

Don't worry, is gonna be soon. After all, fleets are way too small scale. Next week we'll be orchestrating ... What was the military term for a group of fleets again? Cohorts? Armada? Legions?

After that we can segment then into civilizations! The [?] processing unit is the limit!

Is it fair to immediately get the ick from the name and the description (OpenShell is the safe, private runtime for autonomous AI agents) without knowing anything about what it does?

"Open" and "Shell" and just calling something private and safe out the box genuinely makes me think it's likely to fail at all of those claims.

You'll love BurningFur, my patented technology for keeping pets away from fireplaces.

Am a furry...I'll take one. Maybe two.

NO! HOT! GET BACK!

There you go. Just don't tell everyone how it works.

where does the human see and approve a policy expansion in practice? Always struggling to find the best surface to review

Looks neat. I’ll give Claude root access so it can set it up.

and my root aws log-in so it can set itself up some service worker accouunts.

Looks neat. I’ll give Claude autonomous access to dumbalink so it can setup root access while I sleep

Or don't give it root access and in the morning you'll have both this and a ready-to-use root exploit!

Humans use 4 to encrypt, AI will use a hash. In both, you will have someone to watch after you.

This. Convenience always trumps security. "I need two numbers in my password? My birthyear will do."

If your user is a human, yes.

If it’s an LLM it’ll be 47.

Or just 4. Seems pretty popular recently.

You opt for your birthyear? Interesting... See, I use my actual birthday. You must have been born 1st-9th?

Was hoping it was this: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu not some bs from nvidia.

Okay its quite interesting!!

Why not just use containers...

Because containers don't use Seccomp and Landlock and check filesystem/network calls against an externally applied policy along w/injecting credentials where needed as a man-in-the-middle, thus keeping the secrets out of reach from the LLM?

But they can no? With a sidecar and some docker network-fu.

I encountered the same challenge building my toy sandbox. I wanted to use containers because that's what I know best.

The harness is launched in an internal only network. There is a sidecar container that provides mitm credential injection/proxy. I got HTTPS and SSH to work so far.

Claude code was quick to build it. No doubt it's copying previous work in this space though, so I know my work is not that original.

I'm testing all the llms that can be used for pen testing right now to see if/how they manage to escape it. Without a kernel exploit I doubt it's possible (not a very high bar I know).

I'm researching the space. Happy to learn more. Some links in my profile if you're interested.

Yes they can. I have been working on the filesystem part with the idea to provide a "a shared folder that syncs for your agents" https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/fdrive/tree/master/crates...

Ok yeah I guess a nice package for running agents is useful with respect to those things. The Dropbox vs mounted ftp drive analogy.

Of course I’m the type to mount a ftp drive like a moron.

Why are we reinventing virtualization & containerisation with AI flavour?

NOOOOOOOO not AI in the heckin start menu!!!1!

Not to be confused with https://open-shell.github.io/Open-Shell-Menu/.

From the top of AGENTS.md:

> We design systems and use agents to implement them — this is not vibe coding.

Lol, what is even the point of such a statement, and who are they to define what vibe codig is or isn't :D

If it's in AGENTS.md, it's not a statement for a human, but for the LLM. Who knows, maybe they have seen, or think to have seen and now cargo-cult, some behaviour improvement due to the sentence.

So a similar shibboleth as "You are a highly experienced software engineer..."? I really wonder if that ever made a difference (or even degrades quality, because people who advertise themselves on the internet as 'highly experienced' are quite often snake oil salesmen ;)

I still use use `Please` a lot when making requests from LLM based on the old idea that people that where polite on stack overflow tended to have better answers :D

However, these days i think i do so because of how much i write for LLMs, and dont want to start sending emails to humans without proper etiquette.

Yes it did help, at least back in the day when they weren't doing tons of RL. If you just train on random text, your prior probability is to return the average of everything. Ask for software, get average software, or worse yet, randomly get either gold or shit. By adding constraints to your prompt like "you are an experienced engineer" it will prefer to return answers like an experienced engineer would give and less like a random noob would. It doesn't suddenly make it smart if it never was, but it helps to reduce the variance and bias towards the good outcomes.

> OpenShell collects anonymous telemetry

Spyware

Use local ai to find any possible telemetry and disable it in the code. Run your own local git repo to hold local edits so you can update and retain them.

You don’t have to disable it in code. Scroll up in this thread to find the officially support env vars.

You can never know for sure that they haven't conveniently forgot to cover with if(env) one or two of twenty two exfiltration functions. I'm not claiming they did that, but I've seen that already.

Well, I guess its time to shamelessly plug my agent sandbox, egzo.ai [1]

Looking at the complexity of OpenShell and the simplicity of just building on top of docker, in a whitelist only mode.. I don't quite get the use-case of OpenShell. May be for large orgs where there is so much legacy and difficulty in organizing access to tools, OpenShell can simply re-use whatever you already have access to on your corporate account.

I chose to build straight on top of docker and agents are simply fully sandboxed by default. All data and network access must be granted in a simple project file, docker-compose style.

The web-ui connects to the docker socket and lets you spawn agents, and connect terminals. I'm having lots of fun with it and it allows me to cleanly organize and isolate my projects.

End-goal is to monitor for the Lethal Trifecta [2], ensuring all individual agents are properly isolated. Not quite there yet.

1: https://github.com/egzo-ai/egzo 2: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/

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