ServiceNow made Arc generally available on October 21 as a personal long-running AI agent inside EmployeeWorks. It ships governed by the Super Intelligence Control Tower and enforced at runtime by NVIDIA OpenShell. The deeper hardware enforcement layer that uses AI Passport with NVIDIA BlueField is still a future release.

This is the follow-on to the October 15 announcement I covered earlier, in which ServiceNow introduced AI Passport as a cryptographically signed credential and expanded EmployeeWorks so employees can build assistants under admin-defined limits. That piece described the authority layer and the self-service building tools. The October 21 release is narrower and more concrete: the personal agent itself is now generally available, and the current control stack that wraps it is the Control Tower plus OpenShell.

What is available now

Arc is included at no additional cost with Foundation, Advanced, and Prime SKUs. Mac support is live. Windows support is expected within weeks. The agent is built for everyday work across ServiceNow workflows, email, Teams, and related tools. It prefers local inference on NVIDIA RTX Spark devices for routine tasks and escalates to frontier models only when the work is more demanding. It can own a goal rather than a fixed sequence of steps, surface pending items from inbox and meetings, and build missing integrations on the fly while remaining inside the OpenShell boundary.

What ships today is policy defined once in the Control Tower and enforced in the sandboxed runtime. Users obtain granular control over which systems the agent can access, which APIs it can call, and what data it can read. Every action stays inside OpenShell so autonomous activity remains contained and auditable.

What is still future

AI Passport, the attested credential the Control Tower is designed to issue, is not yet generally available. The same is true of its integration with NVIDIA OpenShell and NVIDIA BlueField DPUs running Sentry. When those pieces arrive, the stated design is that OpenShell and BlueField will read the passport so revocation can propagate across both layers in roughly a second. A revoked agent’s traffic stops while other workloads on the same host continue, and restoration requires no infrastructure restart. That is the precision-containment claim that differentiates the architecture from pure software policy.

The gap is material. Arc plus OpenShell is what customers can run now. Passport plus BlueField enforcement is what the companies say will arrive later. Enterprises that want long-running personal agents on employee desktops have the current control stack immediately. Those that require hardware-backed revocation and attested credentials will need to wait and then validate the latency, reliability, and third-party agent coverage once those pieces ship.

Why the distinction matters

Most agent controls still live in software policy or application-level logging. Moving the same decision into the runtime, and eventually into a data processing unit that is designed to enforce even if software is compromised, changes the containment model. Precision containment—stopping the revoked agent while leaving other workloads running—is the operational detail that will decide whether teams treat the architecture as usable or as marketing.

The announcement continues the direction ServiceNow and NVIDIA previewed with Project Arc in May. The difference is that the agent itself is now generally available while the deepest enforcement layer remains on the roadmap. That sequence is common. The useful test is how much real containment and auditability the current Control Tower and OpenShell combination delivers on production workloads before the silicon layer arrives.

Related: ServiceNow Gives AI Agents a Runtime Passport and Lets Employees Build Their Own (October 15, 2026).