Perplexity open-sources SPACE, its AI agent sandbox
SPACE runs every Perplexity Computer task inside its own Firecracker microVM, and the company says 108 attempts by frontier models to break out of it all failed.
Perplexity open-sourced SPACE on 15 October, the sandbox platform that has run every task for its Computer agent since July. The code is on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 licence, with hosted docs at space.docs.perplexity.ai.
Each agent task gets its own Firecracker microVM, with credentials and network access held outside the sandbox rather than inside it. Perplexity says sandbox creation is three to five times faster than with its previous, commercially bought provider, and that the system has handled millions of sandbox creations a day since it went live. The company also ran 108 attempts by frontier models to break out of the VM: none escaped to the host, though it found and fixed some network-restriction bypasses along the way. Akamai, Crusoe and CoreWeave have already lined up to offer SPACE to their own customers.
Why it matters: if you’re building anything that lets an AI agent execute arbitrary code, isolation is usually the hardest part to get right yourself. SPACE is a production-tested option you can self-host instead of building that layer from scratch or paying a third-party sandbox provider.
The caveat: the speed and scale numbers are Perplexity’s own production comparison against its old provider, not an independent benchmark, and running it yourself means standing up the microVM infrastructure, not just calling an API.