By Hamza Faisal
ServiceNow and Nvidia have unveiled the enterprise's most security-conscious AI agent yet. Arc — "a personal long-running AI agent that can take on everyday work" — is generally available as of Wednesday, after the two companies first floated the idea back in May.
Arc is built for the unglamorous grind of office work: email, Microsoft Teams, and the productivity tools where workdays quietly disappear. It runs locally on an employee's desktop or on a separate device inside Nvidia's OpenShell runtime, and it is tuned to run on Nvidia's new RTX Spark devices, which are built for local AI work. The agent develops memory and skills over time, scans inboxes and meeting notes to surface work and action items, and keeps data local where possible — handing complex tasks to frontier models only when necessary.
At launch, Arc is available on Mac, with Windows support expected within weeks. It is not sold as a separate product: it comes bundled with ServiceNow's EmployeeWorks, at no extra cost on the Foundation, Advanced, and Prime plans.
Two halves of a security pitch
The launch's real pitch is the security sandwich wrapped around the agent. Businesses have been nervous about autonomous agents after a run of agent-related security problems this year, so ServiceNow split the job in two.
ServiceNow's Super Intelligence Control Tower is where IT writes the policies: which apps an agent may open, which APIs it may call, and which data it may read. It monitors activity, reviews access, and checks for risks such as prompt injection. Nvidia's open-source OpenShell runtime then enforces those rules while the agent is actually working — the software and the chips underneath both refuse anything that breaks them.
CrowdStrike is integrating its Falcon Guardian with OpenShell as well, adding third-party muscle to the enforcement layer.
The passport check
Last week, ServiceNow introduced AI Passport, an attested record that lists exactly what each agent is trusted to do. Under the new setup, Nvidia OpenShell, Nvidia Sentry, and BlueField data processing units can read that passport and approve or block actions on the spot.
If IT revokes an agent's passport, the blocked task is held inside a sandbox so reviewers can audit it later, while other approved work keeps going without a restart. ServiceNow says enforcing the revocation in BlueField hardware helps stop compromised software from overriding the decision — moving enforcement down past software, into silicon itself.
Trust is the feature now
Arc is not the first enterprise agent, but it is one of the first to make trust the headline feature rather than the footnote. After a summer of agent-led breaches soured executives on digital workers, ServiceNow and Nvidia are betting that the winner of the enterprise-agent race will be whoever lets companies keep control.
Whether IT departments actually hand their workflows to a long-running agent is still the real test — but with Arc, at least they get to hold the keys.
By Hamza Faisal
