ServiceNow’s Arc agent is live on Mac, with revocation in about a second

ServiceNow and Nvidia have made Arc generally available, as ZDNET reported. It is a personal, long-running AI agent for everyday work across workflows, email and Teams. ServiceNow says it comes at no extra cost with some plans, on Mac first.

Mac now, Windows within weeks, no separate price

According to ServiceNow’s press release, issued October 21 and datelined Berlin for Nvidia’s GTC event, Arc ships as part of ServiceNow EmployeeWorks. It is included at no additional cost with the Foundation, Advanced and Prime SKUs. Mac support is live, and ServiceNow expects Windows support within weeks. The company lists no separate price.

Arc can run on its own computer inside the secure Nvidia OpenShell runtime, or directly on an employee’s desktop. For everyday tasks it uses local models, and it calls frontier models for harder ones, on Nvidia RTX Spark hardware, according to the company.

ServiceNow describes the agent as one that takes ownership of a task: it plans the work, carries it out across enterprise systems, checks its own results and keeps going until the job is done. It also looks for work on its own in backlogs, inboxes, meetings and conversations, builds an integration when none exists (inside the OpenShell boundary), and develops memory and skills over time.

Jon Sigler, who leads ServiceNow’s AI platform, called Arc “the first personal AI agent built for everyday work and governable by IT”.

Governance is the selling point, in two layers

The security story is the center of the launch. ServiceNow’s Super Intelligence Control Tower sets policies and restricts what an agent can do at runtime, including which systems, APIs and data Arc can reach. Control can be fine-grained: the company’s example is blocking one write to a production system while the agent’s other work continues.

Each agent, MCP server and other governed AI asset gets an AI Passport, an attested record issued by the Control Tower. Enforcement works at two levels, per the release. At the software level, OpenShell honors passport revocations. At the hardware level, Nvidia Sentry on BlueField provides hardware-backed trust. ServiceNow says a revocation reaches both layers in about one second, that a revoked agent is contained while other workloads on the same host keep running, and that restoring it needs no infrastructure restart.

Justin Boitano, Nvidia’s VP for enterprise, said “policy has to be enforced everywhere an agent runs”. ZDNET framed the launch as an attempt to solve the agent security problem with several real-time checks.

One caveat in the release: AI Passport enforcement inside OpenShell and on BlueField DPUs is expected in a future release, so the full two-layer model described above is not yet shipping. The release gives no date.

What to watch before trusting it with your inbox

Arc is not new as a concept. ServiceNow first showed it as Project Arc at its Knowledge 2026 conference on May 5, as an autonomous desktop agent, according to its May announcement. The October news is availability, and the move from a desktop agent toward one that runs inside a sandboxed runtime.

The hardware enforcement arrives against a busy Nvidia week. The company launched an OpenShell Reference Architecture for securing and governing agents, with partners including Canonical, AWS and BBVA, as reported by The Register via Techmeme. We covered it in Nvidia moves AI agent security from software into the chip with OpenShell blueprint. TechCrunch reported on October 19 that Nvidia also released new open models for running agents in the enterprise and on PCs.

Three things would confirm or undercut the claims:

• Windows timing. Most corporate desktops run Windows, so “within weeks” decides how many customers can use Arc at all.
• The enforcement release. Until passport checks ship in OpenShell and on BlueField, the one-second revocation figure is a company claim that has not been independently verified.
• Real-world containment. Other vendors are also building agent controls, such as Microsoft, whose approach we described in Microsoft’s new agent security assumes your AI agents may turn on you. How agents behave when they hold email and Teams access is the practical test.

The release does not say how many customers are using Arc, what hardware beyond RTX Spark is supported, or how the local and frontier models are chosen. Those details are not established by the sources we could read.