Agent Toolkit and NAT
NVIDIA Agent Toolkit vs NeMo Agent Toolkit: what is the difference?
The NVIDIA Agent Toolkit is the whole collection NVIDIA announced in March 2026: open models, open agents, open skills and open runtimes for building AI agents. The NVIDIA NeMo Agent Toolkit, often shortened to NAT, is one part of it: the code library for building, tracing, evaluating and serving agents. You use the library to write an agent, and the wider toolkit for the models and runtime around it.
Update, November 2026
NVIDIA has deprecated the NeMo Agent Toolkit library as of October 2026, with end of life at the end of 2026, and names NeMo Relay, NeMo Fabric and NeMo Helix as its successors. The NVIDIA Agent Toolkit announced in March 2026 continues. Every agent built in Katonic is a declarative definition that compiles to NVIDIA's open agent software. Today that software is the NeMo Agent Toolkit. When NVIDIA changes the runtime, Katonic changes the compiler and your agents carry over.
Side by side
| NVIDIA Agent Toolkit | NVIDIA NeMo Agent Toolkit (NAT) | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A collection of open models and software | A code library |
| What is in it | Nemotron models, the AI-Q blueprint, skills such as cuOpt, runtimes such as OpenShell, and the NeMo Agent Toolkit | Agent configuration, tool connections, tracing, a profiler, an evaluation harness and serving |
| Who uses it | Enterprises and software vendors choosing parts for agents | Developers writing and testing an agent |
| How you get it | Part by part, from NVIDIA | Installed as a package |
| Works with other frameworks | Yes | Yes: LangChain and LangGraph, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, Google ADK |
Where the names came from
The library came first and has been renamed along the way, which is why older articles call it by other names. In March 2026 NVIDIA used "Agent Toolkit" for the broader set of models, agents, skills and runtimes, with the library as one member. Search results still mix the two.
Which one do you need?
- You are a developer who wants to build and test one agent: start with the NeMo Agent Toolkit.
- You want an agent that researches across company documents: look at the AI-Q blueprint.
- You want agents to run under strict policy on a machine: look at OpenShell.
- You want many teams to build and run agents under one set of controls: you need a platform on top of the toolkit.
Where Katonic fits
Katonic is built on the NeMo Agent Toolkit. Every agent built in Katonic compiles to NVIDIA's open agent software. From the wider NVIDIA stack Katonic also uses NeMo Guardrails for safety and NVIDIA NIM or NVIDIA Dynamo to serve models on your own GPUs, and it works with Nemotron and other open-weight models.
Read next
- What is the NVIDIA Agent Toolkit? →
- NeMo Agent Toolkit vs LangGraph, CrewAI and LangChain →
- NVIDIA Agent Toolkit for enterprise AI →
- NVIDIA announcement (nvidia.com) →
- NVIDIA NeMo Agent Toolkit is deprecated: what replaces it? →
- NVIDIA migration guide for the NeMo Agent Toolkit →
Questions and answers
What does NAT stand for at NVIDIA?
It is the short name for the NVIDIA NeMo Agent Toolkit, the code library for building, tracing, evaluating and serving agents.
Is the NeMo Agent Toolkit part of the NVIDIA Agent Toolkit?
Yes. The NVIDIA Agent Toolkit is the wider collection, and the NeMo Agent Toolkit is the library inside it.
Is OpenShell the same as the NeMo Agent Toolkit?
No. OpenShell is a runtime that runs agents under policy. The NeMo Agent Toolkit is the library used to build and evaluate them.
Are both open source?
NVIDIA describes the Agent Toolkit as open source models and software, and the NeMo Agent Toolkit is published as an open-source library.
Which one is Katonic built on?
The NeMo Agent Toolkit. Every agent built in Katonic compiles to NVIDIA's open agent software, which today is the NeMo Agent Toolkit.