Nvidia and ServiceNow announced Project Arc at ServiceNow Knowledge 2026, a desktop-based autonomous agent runtime designed for knowledge workers including developers, IT teams, and administrators. The product was unveiled during a keynote featuring Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott, according to Nvidia’s engineering blog.
Unlike cloud-hosted agent platforms, Project Arc runs on employee machines. It can access local file systems, terminals, and installed applications to complete complex multi-step tasks that traditional automation cannot handle.
“It can run Claude Codex, it can run OpenClaw, it can run any of the agent families,” Justin Boitano, vice president of enterprise AI platforms at Nvidia, told Yahoo Finance.
OpenShell: The Sandbox Layer
Every action Project Arc takes executes inside Nvidia OpenShell, an open-source runtime for deploying autonomous agents in sandboxed, policy-governed environments. Enterprises can define what an agent can see, which tools it can use, and how each action is contained.
ServiceNow is building on and contributing to OpenShell as a shared foundation for secure agent execution. “By combining OpenShell’s runtime layer with ServiceNow AI Control Tower, and powered by ServiceNow Action Fabric, we’re delivering the governance and security that enterprise AI requires,” said Jon Sigler, executive vice president and general manager of AI Platform at ServiceNow, in the announcement.
Governance Through AI Control Tower
Project Arc connects natively to ServiceNow’s AI Platform through Action Fabric, which provides workflow intelligence and auditability for every action the agent takes. AI Control Tower monitors agent behavior in real time, tracks file access, and logs command execution. According to Yahoo Finance, this monitoring extends across the full agent lifecycle from deployment to optimization.
The companies are also advancing NOWAI-Bench, an open benchmarking suite for enterprise AI agents integrated with Nvidia’s NeMo Gym library. It includes EnterpriseOps-Gym, where Nvidia’s Nemotron 3 Super currently ranks first among open-source models.
Desktop vs. Cloud in the Agent War
Project Arc represents a distinct architectural bet. Most enterprise agent platforms, including Google’s Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and Microsoft’s Agent 365, center on cloud-hosted execution. Project Arc bets that agents handling sensitive local content, terminal commands, and desktop applications need to run where the data already lives.
The Blackwell infrastructure underpinning the system delivers more than 50x greater token output per watt than Nvidia’s Hopper generation, resulting in roughly 35x lower cost per million tokens, according to Nvidia. For enterprises running agents across millions of workflows, that efficiency gap determines whether agent deployment scales beyond pilots.
The open-source OpenShell runtime, combined with agent-family agnosticism, positions Project Arc as infrastructure rather than a walled garden. Whether enterprises adopt it depends on whether the governance story holds up under production load, where shadow AI and unmonitored agent activity have become the central anxiety for CISOs.