Perplexity has open-sourced SPACE, the sandbox it says has powered its Computer AI agent since July. The Apache 2.0 project gives developers an infrastructure building block for running agent-written code in isolated virtual machines, with cloud providers including CoreWeave and Crusoe signed up to offer it.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
SPACE stands for Sandboxed Platform for Agentic Code Execution. Perplexity describes it as a Rust platform that runs agent code in isolated Firecracker microVMs. Its stateful features include pausing and resuming sessions, branching them and keeping rolling snapshots. It is designed for Kubernetes deployments, with a reported median virtual-machine spin-up time of about 60 milliseconds.
Perplexity says red-teamers tried 118 sandbox breakouts against nine frontier models and none succeeded. That is the company’s account of its testing, not a guarantee that the sandbox cannot be breached. Its blog also says the platform creates environments three to five times faster than the commercial provider it replaced. CoreWeave, Akamai and Crusoe are partnering to make SPACE available to customers.
Read Perplexity’s SPACE announcement.
Why it matters
AI agents that write and run code need somewhere to do it without handing them the keys to the host system. SPACE’s appeal is that it combines isolation with the ability to preserve and resume a session, rather than treating every run as disposable. Open-sourcing it under Apache 2.0 could let developers inspect, adapt and deploy the system themselves; cloud partnerships offer another route for teams that would rather not build the infrastructure from scratch.
The security and speed figures are worth noting, but they are Perplexity’s reported results, not a substitute for independent testing. The practical question is whether other teams can reproduce them and use the platform safely at scale.
Our read
This is a meaningful piece of agent infrastructure, not just another agent demo. Open code, persistent sessions and distribution through cloud providers make SPACE a project to watch. The interesting test is whether its sandbox controls hold up beyond the company’s own evaluations. A virtual wall is only useful if the door stays shut.
What to watch
- Whether Perplexity publishes more detail about the red-team tests and their methods.
- When CoreWeave, Akamai and Crusoe make SPACE available, and on what terms.
- Whether independent users reproduce the reported performance and security results.
Discussion spark: Should teams trust an agent-code sandbox based on its creator’s security tests, or should independent evaluation be a prerequisite for deployment?
Sources and evidence
- Perplexity Open-Sources SPACE Sandbox Platform for AI Agents (15 October 2026, 16:46 UTC)
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