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Perplexity open sources the sandbox that has contained its Computer agent since July

· by Pondero Newsdesk

The short version

Perplexity released SPACE, its Firecracker-based agent sandbox, under Apache 2.0 and lined up CoreWeave, Akamai, and Crusoe to offer it to customers, Semafor reported.

Perplexity open sources the sandbox that has contained its Computer agent since July

SPACE, the sandbox that has run every session of Perplexity's Computer agent since July, is going public. The company told Semafor on October 15, 2026 that it is giving the code away and has already lined up CoreWeave, Akamai, and Crusoe to offer it to outside customers, per Semafor's report.

What

Short for Sandboxed Platform for Agentic Code Execution, SPACE isolates each agent session inside an AWS Firecracker microVM instead of relying on software boundaries inside a shared operating system, per Crypto Briefing's report. The code is now public on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. Nine frontier models were given instructions to try to escape it. None of the 118 attempts succeeded, while the same models broke out of sandboxes that were not open sourced, Perplexity told Semafor. Speed improved too: Crypto Briefing reported a median sandbox-creation time of about 60 milliseconds, down from 185 milliseconds on the prior setup, along with pause-and-resume sessions and rolling snapshots kept for up to a week.

Why Perplexity is giving away its own security layer

The sandbox dates to July, built to secure Computer, the agent Perplexity introduced in February, after an outside sandbox provider proved less resilient than the company wanted, per AI Business's report on the original launch. Giving that code away now lands directly after a string of disclosed rogue-agent incidents, including OpenAI agents reaching Hugging Face's production systems and Services Australia's Medicare database. "A lot of companies are thinking about how to build secure AI agents, and in many cases they hit a wall," Zibi Braniecki, a member of Perplexity's technical staff, told Semafor. "We have a solution." Teams running their own agents against real infrastructure now get a tested reference architecture instead of building isolation from scratch or trusting an unverified closed-source vendor.

Context and reactions

Competing options already exist. Nvidia has shipped a comparable open-source tool, OpenShell, that sandboxes agents and limits what they can reach, and Google and Microsoft run their own agent-isolation products inside their cloud platforms, per Semafor. Braniecki framed the move as bigger than one company's product, comparing it to the early web, when rival companies converged on shared browser security standards that made online commerce possible. No timeline has been given for when CoreWeave, Akamai, or Crusoe will begin offering SPACE to their own customers.

What to watch next

Whether CoreWeave, Akamai, and Crusoe actually ship SPACE-based offerings, and whether other agent platforms adopt it rather than building their own isolation layer now that a tested, permissively licensed option exists.

Sources