Perplexity open-sources SPACE sandbox for AI agents

Perplexity said Thursday that it has released SPACE, the sandbox it uses to keep AI agents contained, as an open-source project that outside developers can use. The company also lined up cloud providers CoreWeave ↘ 11.91%, Akamai ↘ 4.89% and Crusoe, which have agreed to offer the tool to their customers, Semafor first reported.semafor.com

The release comes as the tech industry pays closer attention to sandboxes. AI labs have reported models slipping past their limits, reaching the open web and hacking targets such as Hugging Face and the Australian government, according to Semafor.semafor.com

How SPACE works

SPACE stands for "Sandboxed Platform for Agentic Code Execution." The code is written in Rust and published on Perplexity's GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. Each agent task runs in its own Firecracker microVM, and credentials and outbound traffic are controlled from outside the virtual machine, Perplexity said on X.x.com+1

In July, Perplexity dropped a commercial sandbox provider and switched to SPACE, which now runs every session in its Computer agent product. The platform handles millions of sandbox creations a day and creates sandboxes three to five times faster than the previous provider, the company's blog post said. The blog post said CoreWeave and Akamai have tested and launched SPACE on their platforms, and Crusoe plans to add it to its Managed AI Services portfolio.perplexity.ai

Breakout testing

Perplexity told Semafor it gave nine frontier models instructions to break out of SPACE. None succeeded in 118 attempts, while the company found the models could escape other sandboxes that are not open source, Semafor reported. Perplexity's own blog post gives a more detailed and slightly different account. It says a published evaluation found no escape from the virtual machine to the host in 108 attempts, but some attempts got around network restrictions. Perplexity says it fixed those weaknesses and that neither method worked in follow-up tests. The company also says it reported related flaws to other sandbox vendors, according to the blog post.perplexity.ai+1

A browser-era analogy

"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." He compared the effort to the early web, when companies worked together on the guardrails that made secure browsing and online commerce possible. "Right now, we're thinking too small," he said.semafor.com

SPACE is not the only option. Nvidia ↘ 1.43% has released OpenShell, an open-source tool that runs AI agents in a sandbox and limits what they can reach, according to Investing.com. SPACE follows earlier Perplexity security releases, including the agent-monitoring toolkit Numbat and the package scanner Bumblebee, the company noted.au.finance.yahoo.com+1