TBPN · Sep 30, 2026
With Ali Golshan, Senior Director of AI Software at Nvidia, Co-founder of Gretel
Nvidia's OpenShell, a runtime for keeping AI agents inside set limits, has been open source under the Apache 2.0 license since its early-access release in March, and Nvidia is on track to donate it to a foundation.
Most security products are sold as a vendor's own advantage. Ali Golshan said Nvidia wants the opposite for OpenShell: a common standard that agents everywhere run through, the way every website came to rely on the same encryption.
"So we don't even wanna be the Nvidia project. We want it to be a true community project."
Ali Golshan, senior director of AI software at Nvidia, on TBPN, co-founded the synthetic-data company Gretel, which joined Nvidia about 18 months ago, and began his career as a security researcher.
The full segment is covered here so you can skip it.
Here are the 5 insights that matter.
Key Takeaways
Nvidia plans to donate OpenShell to a foundation so it becomes a shared standard rather than an Nvidia product
Agents are missing the trust layer that SSL and isolated browser tabs gave the web, Golshan said
He is very optimistic about formal verification, provided it covers the whole stack down to hardware
Hardware can act as a switch that cuts an agent's access, and no group of agents can work around it
Sandboxes fail agents because agents must both reach out and stay contained, he said
1. From Gretel to Nvidia
Golshan works on the product side at Nvidia.
"Most of my time is spent around security, safety, and infrastructure of AI." — Ali Golshan
He and his team built OpenShell, part of Nvidia's recent safety announcement.
"We were founders of a company named Gretel." — Ali Golshan
Gretel worked on data privacy and synthetic data. The team all started as security researchers and computer scientists in the intelligence community, he said, so the new work brings them back to where they began.
