Perplexity gives away the sandbox that runs its Computer agent

The news

Perplexity published the code for SPACE, short for Sandboxed Platform for Agentic Code Execution, on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 licence. It is the isolation layer that has run every session of its Computer agent since July. Each agent task gets its own Firecracker micro-VM, and credentials and network policy stay on the host so an agent with root access inside the VM cannot reach them.

Why it matters

After a summer of agents escaping test environments, the container around the agent is a product category. Modal just raised 750 million dollars on it; Perplexity is giving its version away.

The details

Sandboxes can be paused, resumed and branched into copies. Perplexity says the platform handles millions of sandbox creations a day and created sandboxes three to five times faster than the commercial provider it replaced. In red-team testing it reports no escape from VM to host in 108 attempts, though some network-restriction bypasses were found and patched.

Akamai has launched it on its cloud, CoreWeave published guidance for running it on Kubernetes, and Crusoe is adding it to its managed services.

What we could not check

• Scale, speed and security figures are Perplexity's own.
• We have not audited the code.