Red Hat launches sandbox for OpenClaw agents – SiliconANGLE

After OpenClaw caused a sensation – or triggered a tidal wave, depending on who you ask — In the artificial intelligence community, security became the top priority.

Ahead of the upcoming KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA event, Red Hat LLC executives shared further insight into OpenShell, a secure, open agent runtime designed to keep OpenClaw deployments secure and controlled. Nvidia Corp. has developed OpenShell, which Red Hat integrates into its AI platform. The architecture that places agents in isolated sandbox environments.

“OpenClaw was a complete success,” he said Pete Cheslock (Pictured right), lead AI community architect at Red Hat. “This autonomous agent that can do anything – it was really shocking to see the ecosystem and the community around it expanding. As people started looking into it…you started asking the questions that everyone should be asking, especially enterprises, which is: What can this access do and what can it do? That’s when tools like OpenShell started to answer some tough questions.”

Cheslock and Stu Miniman (left), senior director of hybrid platform market insights at Red Hat, spoke with theCUBE Research’s principal analyst Dave Vellante before KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NAduring an exclusive interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the development of KubeCon and how Red Hat is responding to AI security concerns with open source tools. (*Disclosure below.)

Secure OpenClaw with OpenShell

On November 9th, Red Hat will host an OpenShift Commons Gathering, an opportunity for open source practitioners to hear from leaders in the field. Kubernetes is just one part of the cloud ecosystem and its “heterogeneity” is increasing as AI places demands on the multicloud, Miniman explained.

“There’s no better way to start the week than to get going [to OpenShift Commons]“We have financial services companies, we have companies working on AI, working on virtualization, working on some of these important cloud native pieces, and we also have two of our Red Hat principals.” We are clearly making an important contribution to all of this and have broad customer acceptance.”

As enterprises reevaluate agent security following the rapid adoption of OpenClaw, Red Hat and Nvidia are working together to integrate OpenShell into enterprise AI environments. The idea is to share OpenClaw agents and the OpenShell architecture so that agents’ access to potentially compromised information is monitored and secured.

“The OpenShell community is obviously new… but it’s growing incredibly quickly,” Cheslock said. “We have contributors from a variety of companies. It’s built on top of some core Kubernetes specialty groups. Agent Sandbox is one of them, so you can deploy these agents in a secure way using the native Kubernetes APIs. Engineers who have to deploy these agents have to learn a lot of new things, but they don’t have to learn the APIs to deploy them.”

Although agents can pose serious security risks, companies also use them for protection. AI-powered security tools can test vulnerabilities faster and more extensively than their human counterparts, helping companies identify and close gaps before attackers can find them.

“We’re trying to make sure customers feel comfortable understanding and using these tools,” Miniman said. “That’s the forefront. There’s even more effort being put into security than ever before, which has always been a focus of Red Hat…it’s trust, compliance and security. If we make sure that layer is as secured and reliable and trustworthy as possible, everything else becomes secondary.”

Here’s the full video interview, part of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s pre-event coverage KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA:

(*Disclosure: Red Hat sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over the content of theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE