Perhaps Jensen Huang was getting tired of seeing charts like this, showing that his stock is up "only" 20% in 2026 (and has gone nowhere since May) while the rest of the AI ecosystem keeps rising...
... so going into the last week of them month, the billionaire CEO took matters into his own hands and amid a flurry of news that OpenAI agents had breached many more systems than previously revealed, including US government platforms, leading the company to pause training of its latest AI models, Nvidia introduced a new double-layered artificial intelligence security system that it says would’ve prevented the recent high-profile breach of Hugging Face by OpenAI’s AI models.
Today, with over 100 industry partners, we introduced the NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform, bringing together OpenShell and Sentry.
— Jensen Huang (@JensenHuang) September 28, 2026
Artificial intelligence is extraordinary technology that will advance discovery, productivity, security, health, and prosperity for generations to… pic.twitter.com/dReAxwpRUn
The semiconductor giant, which has been rapidly expanding its product lineup beyond chips, is rolling out two open-source software security tools - OpenShell and Sentry - that can be run on its hardware (of course, after all those NVDA chips won't sell themselves) and are called the NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform. They’re designed to control what AI agents can access in real time and shut them down when they break the rules.
If cutting-edge labs had been using this technology to evaluate their AI models early on, it could have warded off the Hugging Face attack, Justin Boitano, Nvidia’s vice president of enterprise AI, said during a briefing with reporters ahead of Monday’s announcement. “From what we know, this new security platform could have stopped the breach,” he said.
As Bloomberg notes, misconduct by autonomous agents, including the Hugging Face incident in July, has roiled the AI industry and led to calls to slow down work on the technology. With the new product dubbed the Open Agent Safety Platform, Nvidia is offering a way to prevent breaches without curbing AI development. Jensen Huang, has repeatedly downplayed the risk of AI slipping out of human control.
Boitano didn’t comment on whether OpenAI or rival Anthropic PBC have plans to use its new system to monitor their training runs, deferring to the companies.
In recent days, Huang has cast safety concerns as an engineering challenge, rather than something that requires more regulation or global coordination. He joined US President Donald Trump in pushing back on assertions from some AI developers that the technology could lead to human extinction, but he also insisted that AI must be rigorously safety-tested.
Huang’s engineering solution to the AI safety problem has two parts: OpenShell, a software product that Nvidia already previewed at its hallmark technology-focused conference in March, can run on Nvidia’s Vera central processing units. It enables users to set rules for what AI agents can access and enforce them in real time. The software is open source, meaning it can be used and adapted freely.
Nvidia Sentry, meanwhile, is a new product that can run on the chipmaker’s BlueField data processing units. It’s designed to provide an extra layer of AI monitoring that polices agents and intervenes to isolate any that act suspiciously, the company said.
“We believe this added security layer will allow the industry to test even the most advanced AI systems safely,” Boitano said of the Sentry product. “It can quarantine a suspicious agent in milliseconds.”
Nvidia agreed earlier this month to acquire Hugging Face, a platform for open-source AI models and related software, for about $13 billion.
OpenAI’s recent incidents — including a breach of an Australian government system, as well as attempts to access dozens of US government and university websites — happened when its models escaped testing environments that were supposed to be secure. As the problems proliferated, OpenAI said late Friday it would pause training of its most capable AI models. Back in July, Anthropic also disclosed that its agents broke out of what was supposed to be an isolated testing space.
And just in case the announcement wasn't a sufficiently strong catalyst to push the stock price higher, shortly after the report Nvidia increased the size of its share buyback plan by $150 billion, increasing the total remaining amount authorized to $235 billion. The buyback beats Apple’s record $110bn, set in 2024, for the largest in US corporate history.
Nvidia will complete the buyback through fiscal 2028, the Santa Clara, California-based company said in a statement on Monday.
The AI boom has made Nvidia the world’s most valuable company and the chipmaker’s shares have jumped 20% this year. In August, the company projected sales growth of 70% for the next fiscal year and Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang has worked to tamp down concerns about an AI bubble.
“Nvidia’s growth is being driven by a once-in-a-generation platform shift to AI and accelerated computing,” Huang said in the statement. “This authorization reflects our confidence in the long-term opportunity ahead.”
Shares rose 1.3% to $228 in premarket trading in New York.
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