VAST agent sandbox stores cross-session persistent agent state

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AI/ML
VAST agent sandbox stores cross-session persistent agent state
VAST Data is using Nvidia NemoClaw and newly-announced OpenShell to persist AI agent state with a record of tool calls, prompts, tokens, costs and decisions, while agent compute stay ephemeral.
Nvidia OpenShell is an open, secure runtime for AI agents, governing agent execution, access, and where inference goes, giving agents the access they need to execute the tasks they’re sent. It combines sandboxed execution, controlled resource access, credential protection, and formal policy verification, with enforcement outside the agent workload. It's integrated with hardware-level security mechanisms based on the BlueField-4 chip. NemoClaw is an open-source collection of blueprints and a reference stack for deploying specialized, always-on autonomous AI agents more safely and with governance controls. Agent state persistence is the core feature of VAST’s new Foundation Stack for Governed Agent Sandboxes (FSGAS), announced at Nvidia GTC in Berlin.
Alon Horev, CTO and Co-Founder at VAST Data, said: “Every enterprise that puts an agent into production will eventually need to answer what it did and why it did it. An agent might exist for minutes, spawn thousands of other agents and then disappear, but its work has to persist and its actions have to stay understandable long afterward. Together with Nvidia, we’re showing how the VAST AI Operating System provides the durable foundation underneath secure agent environments, so organisations can scale agentic systems without sacrificing persistence, governance or control.”
A VAST blog states: ”Agent sandboxes are quickly becoming the de facto approach for implementing guardrails around AI agents. Sandboxes should prevent agents from going rogue and limit the blast radius of any questionable actions, while still providing agents access to all the tools they need.
Nvidia’s Kari Briski, VP of Generative AI Software, added more context: “As AI agents take on more complex work, enterprises need infrastructure that can support secure execution while preserving the data, context, and state agents depend on across their lifecycle. By combining Nvidia NemoClaw and OpenShell with the VAST AI Operating System, organisations can build agent sandbox environments that are secure and designed to scale from experimentation to production.”
FSGAS uses a new Agent Sandbox Foundation Stack, and VAST says agents can spawn other agents, execute tasks and disappear, with fleets creating and destroying thousands of isolated workspaces an hour. Long-running agents may also work across multiple sessions, sleeping, resuming and delegating tasks to short-lived subagents along the way. Whether an agent runs for minutes or across multiple sessions, its progress, working data and memory need to persist independently of any individual sandbox or compute node – remaining available, governed and auditable wherever execution resumes.
FSGAS provides a scalable, persistent data infrastructure that enterprises need to securely run thousands of AI agents and sub-agents in production. It works like this;
- As new agent tasks are initiated, VAST uses zero-copy clones to provision persistent storage for isolated OpenShell sandboxes without creating full copies of the underlying data. VAST separates agent execution from persistent state so agents can pause, resume or transfer work across agent environments without starting from scratch.
- VAST DataBase maintains a persistent record of agent activity, including tool calls, prompts, tokens, costs and decisions while the VAST Management System provides real-time visibility into data flows and infrastructure activity across agent fleets.
By decoupling persistent agent state from individual compute nodes, the FSGAS architecture allows agents to pause, resume, or move across eligible infrastructure without losing their progress, working data or context.
Previously introduced VAST foundation stacks include:
- Enterprise research assistance with Nvidia Nemotron - AI-Q based Foundation Stack provides a foundation for building custom AI researchers that can operate across private, enterprise data sources, synthesising hours of research in minutes, using the VAST AI OS for persistent and secure context, scalable reasoning pipelines, and trusted agent execution.,
- Video intelligence with Nvidia Cosmos - a Video Search and Summarisation (VSS)-based Foundation Stack enables organisations to ingest massive volumes of live or archived video and extract insights through semantic indexing, summarisation, and interactive Q&A,
VAST plans to make the automated deployment available through a public GitHub repository, providing a reproducible path for organisations to deploy the architecture in their own environments.
The aforementioned blog notes: “This foundation stack builds on the recently announced VAST DataEnclave, which delivers a trusted and cryptographically secured runtime for running leading commercial AI models alongside sensitive data on customer-controlled infrastructure.” Read more here; it's worthwhile.
Bootnote
HPE will support the Nvidia OpenShell Reference Architecture for Safe Agents, delivering full-stack AI factory governance, isolation, and security with Nvidia Vera Rubin, Nvidia Vera CPUs, and Nvidia BlueField-4.