Can you actually buy Nvidia's AI agent cage today, and what does it cost?

Half of it is free and shipping. The other half has no price tag at all.

Short version: it depends which half you mean.

The software half, called OpenShell, is open source under a permissive licence, and it installs with a single command on Linux, on Macs with Apple chips, and on Windows through WSL. It has actually been around since March. You can try it today, no purchase order needed.

The hardware half is the watchdog, Sentry, which runs on BlueField-4 chips. And here is the catch: Nvidia has not published a price for it, and the reports covering the launch do not mention a firm availability date.

So what exactly was announced, then?

A platform and a reference design, plus a long list of partners. Cisco, CrowdStrike, Dell, HPE, Microsoft, Palantir, Salesforce and SAP are all on it. That is a serious signal. But working with something is not the same as shipping it to you.

One more thing worth knowing. The headline promise, that it can quarantine an agent in milliseconds, comes from Nvidia itself. Nobody outside has independently measured it yet. Treat it as a promise, not a benchmark.

And because Sentry only really makes sense if you already run, or are willing to buy, specific hardware, the real cost question is less "what does the chip cost" and more "what does it cost to rebuild around it".