Chainguard Assemble 2026 brought together developers, platform teams, and security leaders to discuss the future of secure software development in an AI-driven world. Over the past year, software creation has accelerated rapidly as AI coding tools help engineers write, test, and ship code faster than ever before. At the same time, that speed increases the amount of open source software entering modern applications and expands the overall attack surface organizations must manage.

At this year’s event, we shared how Chainguard is responding to this shift. Across the keynote, speakers highlighted how the Chainguard Factory has evolved to rebuild and maintain open source artifacts at unprecedented scale, while new innovations extend that secure-by-default foundation across the entire software development lifecycle.

Throughout the morning, we introduced several new capabilities designed to help organizations build faster while maintaining confidence in the software they deploy. From OS packages and container images to CI/CD workflows and AI agent skills, these announcements expand Chainguard’s role as the trusted source for open source in an AI-native development environment.

Chainguard OS Packages

We began the morning with Chainguard OS Packages, which provides direct access to the enterprise-grade packages that power Chainguard Containers. Built from source and maintained in the Chainguard Factory, these packages allow organizations to assemble their own container images while relying on continuously rebuilt, zero-CVE components maintained by Chainguard.

Many sophisticated platform teams want precise control over how their images are composed and maintained. Chainguard OS Packages enables that level of control while removing the operational burden of monitoring vulnerabilities, rebuilding packages, and tracking upstream changes. Teams can continue using their existing build tooling, such as Dockerfiles, Bazel, or apko, while relying on Chainguard to maintain the underlying package ecosystem.

Chainguard Catalog Starter

We also announced Chainguard Catalog Starter, a new free offering that gives developers immediate access to trusted container images from the industry’s most comprehensive catalog. With Catalog Starter, builders can select five container images from the Chainguard catalog and begin using the same minimal, continuously rebuilt artifacts that enterprise teams deploy instantly.

As AI-assisted development increases the number of dependencies used in modern applications, teams want to start with production-ready open source components they can trust. Catalog Starter lowers the barrier to entry by making secure-by-default container images accessible to developers and teams of any size, helping them begin projects on a trusted foundation.

Chainguard Commercial Builds

Next, we introduced Chainguard Commercial Builds, a partnership program that enables software vendors to deliver hardened, verifiable container images for their commercial applications. Through this program, Chainguard works directly with vendors to package and maintain their software using the same AI-native factory that powers Chainguard’s open source containers.

Early partners include Azul, Chainloop, Elastic, F5 NGINX, GitLab, Grafana Labs, Mattermost, Percona, and others. These partnerships allow organizations to deploy commercial software that meets the same security standards as the open source components they already rely on, delivering minimal images with provenance, SBOMs, and predictable vulnerability remediation timelines.

Chainguard Repository

We also unveiled Chainguard Repository, a unified experience for consuming secure-by-default open source artifacts. With Chainguard Repository, organizations can access containers, libraries, OS packages, CI/CD workflows, and agent skills through a single endpoint with built-in security policies and visibility.

These policies automatically enforce organizational security standards, including controls such as license enforcement, cooldown periods, and vulnerability blocking. As the Chainguard Factory continues rebuilding more artifacts from verifiable source code, an organization’s security posture improves automatically without requiring changes to developer workflows.

Chainguard Actions

Later in the keynote, we introduced Chainguard Actions, a secure catalog of hardened CI/CD workflows built and maintained in the Chainguard Factory. CI/CD pipelines operate with the highest privileges in modern software delivery, yet many workflows are pulled directly from community marketplaces with little review or oversight.

Chainguard Actions ingests widely used CI/CD workflows, evaluates them against a comprehensive security ruleset, and automatically remediates unsafe patterns before publishing them in a trusted catalog. These workflows are continuously monitored and resecured when upstream changes occur, or new attack techniques emerge, enabling developers and AI agents to ship software without introducing supply chain risk.

Chainguard Agent Skills

We also announced Chainguard Agent Skills, a continuously maintained catalog of hardened AI agent skills. As AI agents become embedded across development workflows, these skills are rapidly emerging as a new class of third-party software dependency.

Agent Skills automatically ingests skills from community registries, reviews them against security and quality rules, and hardens them using reconciliation agents before publishing them with a complete audit trail. Developers can extend their agents' capabilities while maintaining clear visibility into how those skills were validated and maintained.

The Guardener

Finally, we introduced The Guardener, an AI-powered system designed to automate the migration and ongoing maintenance of software artifacts across development workflows. Today, the Guardener focuses on converting legacy Dockerfiles into minimal, zero-CVE Chainguard container images by analyzing, rebuilding, and testing Dockerfiles incrementally.

Over time, the Guardener will extend the capabilities of the Chainguard Factory directly to development environments, enabling organizations to automate artifact updates, dependency maintenance, and ongoing security improvements across their CI/CD pipelines.

Looking ahead

Across every announcement at Assemble 2026, one theme was clear. As AI accelerates software development, the foundation developers rely on must evolve as well.

From trusted container images and OS packages to CI/CD workflows and AI agent skills, Chainguard is expanding the scope of secure-by-default software to meet the needs of modern development teams. By combining the scale of the Chainguard Factory with intelligent automation and agent-driven systems, we are working toward a future where developers and AI agents alike can build software on a foundation they trust.

Thank you to everyone who joined us at Chainguard Assemble 2026. We look forward to continuing this journey together as we build the trusted source for open source. Get in touch with our team to learn more about all our new products and features.