As use of agentic AI accelerates, Red Hat is hoping to position itself as the critical behind-the-scenes plumbing and connective fabric.

To this end, the company has unveiled new desktop and developer suite functions, skills bundles, and a rolling Linux release to help enterprises move beyond the experimental phase.

Announced at Red Hat Summit today, the new features and services are included in the latest release of Red Hat AI, with no additional usage charge. Tools are not metered and usage is not limited, Red Hat execs emphasized in a briefing.

“We’re helping developers accelerate and own their AI strategy with the same rigor they apply to their core IT applications,” said James Labocki, senior director for product management at Red Hat.

Meeting developers where they are

To build a standardized path of sorts, and help developers build and scale agents from their local desktops, Red Hat is making its Red Hat Desktop generally available and enhancing its Advanced Developer Suite.

The company now provides commercial support for the Red Hat build of Podman Desktop, an app for creating, managing, and deploying containers on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Another new capability in Red Hat Desktop is isolated AI agent sandboxing, which allows developers to build and test AI agents on their local hardware while preventing unwanted AI actions that might negatively impact the host operating system (OS).

The company has also expanded integrations in Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces. This secure, zero-configuration development environment now integrates with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Kiro coding assistant (now in technical preview). The environment already integrates with the Claude command line interface (CLI), Microsoft Copilot, Cline, Continue, Roo, and others.

Developers can now connect their preferred tools to their cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE), and use frontier or private models.

Red Hat Desktop is built on Red Hat Hardened Images and Red Hat Trusted Libraries to enhance security. Hardened Images is a curated catalog of trusted, stripped-down, and micro-sized container images scanned for security and functionality. Trusted Libraries provide curated Python packages built on Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) frameworks with a software bill of materials (SBOM) and cryptographic signatures to provide supply chain transparency and verifiability.

With these integrations, developers can access images and libraries from their laptops while also connecting to local or remote OpenShift clusters for unit testing.

https://www.infoworld.com/article/4169801/red-hats-message-to-enterprises-you-dont-need-to-re-platform-for-ai-agents.html