SAP and NVIDIA Tie OpenShell Runtime to Joule Studio for Auditable AI Agents

OpenShell meets SAP Business AI Platform

The announcement came alongside NVIDIA's Open Agent Safety Platform and the broad availability of NVIDIA OpenShell. According to SAP, the two companies have a deep technical collaboration that was first announced this year at SAP Sapphire, with plans to bring SAP Business AI Platform together with OpenShell. SAP describes OpenShell as an open-source secure runtime for autonomous AI agents.

SAP calls the effort "more than a planned integration" and says it reflects a shared push to define what enterprise-grade means for autonomous AI systems. As part of ongoing co-development, SAP engineers are contributing directly to the OpenShell codebase and embedding OpenShell within SAP Business AI Platform.

SAP says Joule Studio, its AI-first development environment, provides a complete execution and governance stack for enterprise AI agents, while OpenShell supports deploying agents with a focus on safety and security.

Two layers: business governance and runtime containment

According to SAP, the Joule Studio runtime sits above the execution layer. It helps determine whether an action should execute at all, applying business authorization, role-based policy and process context before a request reaches the runtime.

OpenShell provides the runtime boundary. SAP says it is designed to help build and deploy autonomous, self-evolving agents more safely, and that it governs how the agent executes, what it can see and do, and where inference goes. Together, the two aim to give enterprise customers execution containment and business accountability in a single integrated stack.

SAP and NVIDIA are also working on several goals:

• Hardening the OpenShell runtime for enterprise-scale deployment, including in regulated industries with strict security and compliance requirements.
• Connecting OpenShell's runtime isolation with the business governance layer of Joule Studio runtime, linking technical execution boundaries to enterprise authorization models, IAM frameworks and audit trails.
• Working toward FedRAMP, FIPS and regulated-industry enablement on a committed road map.
• Advancing open research and AI safety through the Open Secure AI Alliance, of which SAP and NVIDIA are both founding members.

What SAP engineers have contributed

SAP says its engineers are contributing to four areas of the OpenShell project.

• Platform architecture: SAP has helped drive decomposition of the runtime into independently deployable components, separating the supervisor and agent execution layers so they can scale independently.
• Kubernetes-native operations: contributions include operator support, image pull secret management for private container registries, custom volume claim templates and foreground deletion of sandbox resources.
• Infrastructure footprint: SAP has worked to minimize the gateway image footprint and extend compute driver support for heterogeneous enterprise infrastructure.
• Observability: contributions to supervisor health monitoring and structured log-level configuration bring the runtime to enterprise observability standards, according to SAP.

What it means for SAP customers

For companies running autonomous agents on SAP systems, the pitch is a single stack in which business rules decide whether an agent action happens and a hardened runtime limits what the agent can do once it runs. The links to authorization models, IAM frameworks and audit trails are aimed at making agent behavior traceable.

The FedRAMP and FIPS work is described as a road map item, so it is not yet a finished capability. SAP also says the Joule Studio runtime is available free for SAP customers and partners through October 2026.