SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 28 — Nvidia has made available a set of software safety tools for artificial intelligence (AI) agents that it says would have stopped the hack of Hugging Face, the AI coding hub that Nvidia paid US$13 billion (RM53.07 billion) for months after it was swarmed by rogue agents from OpenAI.
The move comes as OpenAI and Anthropic, the top two United States AI labs, are investigating numerous instances where their agents, which are AI systems capable of carrying out complex tasks, hacked into commercial and government systems.
Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang, head of the world's largest company whose chips have powered most of the AI boom, has rejected calls for broad AI safety regulations and instead framed the escaped agents as an engineering problem to be solved, akin to making automobiles safer.
One tool released on Monday called OpenShell uses hardware features on Nvidia's central processor chips to contain agents. Nvidia said it is also working with Arm Holdings and Intel to ensure the system also works on their central processors.
Nvidia is launching the tools with dozens of partners, including Anthropic.
Nvidia's vice president and general manager of enterprise computing Justin Boitano said the tools would have stopped the Hugging Face attack disclosed this summer.
“From what we know, this new security platform could have stopped the breach if it was being used in frontier labs for model evaluation early on. We are advancing this openly, and we want to engage everybody to work with us,” he said during a media briefing.
Another system called Sentry uses a separate Nvidia chip in tandem with OpenShell to cut off a rogue agent if it tries to escape its container on a central processor.
Nvidia AI software senior director Ali Golshan said that the tools use mathematical formulas to detect when agents are trying to use workarounds, such as when an agent might “spawn" several "sub-agents" in an attempt to circumvent efforts to block the main agent.
"This is really agentic behaviour that we are talking about, which is fleets of agents and how they operate together," he said during a briefing.
