After OpenClaw made a splash — or a tidal wave, depending on who you ask — in the artificial intelligence community, security became paramount.

Ahead of the upcoming KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA event, Red Hat LLC leaders gave more insight into OpenShell, a secure, open runtime for agents that is designed to keep OpenClaw deployments safe and governed. Nvidia Corp. developed OpenShell, which Red Hat is integrating into its AI platform. The architecture, which places agents in isolated sandbox environments.

“OpenClaw came out with a bang,” said Pete Cheslock (pictured, right), principal AI community architect at Red Hat. “This autonomous agent that can just do everything — it was really shocking to see the ecosystem and the community expand around it. As people started to dive into it … you start to ask the questions that everyone should be asking, especially enterprise, which is, what can this access and what can it do? That’s where tools like OpenShell started answering some hard questions.”

Cheslock and Stu Miniman (left), senior director of market insights for hybrid platforms at Red Hat, spoke with theCUBE Research Chief Analyst Dave Vellante ahead of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA, during an exclusive interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the evolution of KubeCon and how Red Hat is addressing AI security concerns with open-source tools. (* Disclosure below.)

Securing OpenClaw with OpenShell

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

“There’s no better way to start your week than going [to OpenShift Commons],” he said. “We’ve got financial services companies, we’ve got companies that are working on AI, working on virtualization, working on some of those key cloud-native pieces, as well as we’ve got two of our Red Hat general managers. We are a clear leading contributor to all of these and have broad customer adoption.”

As organizations reassess agent security following OpenClaw’s rapid adoption, Red Hat and Nvidia are collaborating to bring OpenShell into enterprise AI environments. The idea is to use OpenClaw agents and OpenShell’s architecture in concert, so that agents’ access to potentially vulnerable information is monitored and secured.

“The OpenShell community is obviously new … but it’s growing at pretty incredible clip,” Cheslock said. “We’ve got contributors from a wide variety of companies. It builds on top of some core Kubernetes special interest groups. The agent sandbox is one of them, so that you can deploy these agents in a secure way using Kubernetes native APIs. Engineers who have to deploy these agents, there’s a lot of new stuff that they have to learn but they don’t have to learn the APIs to deploy it.”

Although agents can introduce serious security risks, companies are also deploying them for protection. AI-powered security tools can test for vulnerabilities at greater speed and scale than their human counterparts, helping organizations identify and patch gaps before attackers can find them.

“We’re trying to make sure that customers can feel secure and understand and use these tools,” Miniman said. “That’s front and center. There’s even more effort being put on security than ever, which has always been a focus of Red Hat … it’s that trust, compliance and security. If we make sure that layer is as locked down and reliable and trusted as possible, everything else comes secondary.”

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

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE