News · SI
Perplexity has released SPACE, the sandbox platform behind its Computer agent, under the Apache 2.0 licence. Each sandbox is a Firecracker microVM with credentials and network rules held outside it, plus pause, resume, checkpoints and branching. Akamai has launched it on its cloud, Crusoe is adding it to its managed services, and CoreWeave has published an evaluation guide.
Perplexity has open-sourced SPACE, the sandbox platform that runs the workspaces behind its Computer agent, under the Apache 2.0 licence[1][2]. SPACE, short for Sandboxed Platform for Agentic Code Execution, runs agent and user code in isolated Firecracker microVMs and exposes them through an HTTP API[2].
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Perplexity launched Computer, its personal agent product, in February, and in July replaced its commercial sandbox provider with SPACE[1]. Techzine reports that SPACE now creates millions of sandboxes a day for Computer sessions, and that on the same production traffic Perplexity measured sandboxes starting three to five times faster than with its old provider[5]. Perplexity's stated reason for releasing it is that "agent governance is an engineering problem, and open source is essential to solving it"[1].
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Each sandbox is a small virtual machine with its own operating system and writable filesystem, and a central control plane decides when sandboxes are created, paused, resumed or removed[1][3]. SPACE treats the sandbox as untrusted, so network access and platform-held credentials are managed outside it[1]. Agents can reach the services they are allowed to use without those secrets ever living in their working environment[1].
Frequent file snapshots and full-environment checkpoints keep progress across interruptions, and SPACE stores only what changed rather than copying whole environments[1]. That is what lets an agent pause while someone reviews a draft, then pick up with its files and running state intact, or try two approaches in separate copies of the same workspace[1].
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SPACE is written in Rust, but applications talk to it over HTTP and server-sent events, and the first-sandbox walkthrough uses a standard-library-only Python script[2]. The repository covers templates, warm pools of pre-booted sandboxes, base snapshots, operator egress profiles and an E2B compatibility wrapper for teams already using that SDK[2]. The local setup runs on a Kind Kubernetes cluster[2].
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Akamai says it has tested SPACE and launched it on its cloud platform, and Crusoe is adding it to its Managed AI Services[1]. CoreWeave has published a guide for running SPACE on its Kubernetes service, but labels it evaluation only: the install changes containerd on each worker node and runs SPACE's node services with privileged host networking, so CoreWeave advises using dedicated nodes and test data[4].
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If you run coding or data agents, the sandbox is where most of your risk and a good share of your bill sit. SPACE gives you a production-tested design to read, or run, where credentials and egress rules live outside the VM by default. It is worth a weekend on a Kind cluster before your next sandbox contract renewal, but treat the current install path as a starting point rather than a hardened production deployment.
Sources
FAQ
SPACE stands for Sandboxed Platform for Agentic Code Execution. It is Perplexity's platform for running agent and user code in isolated Firecracker microVMs. Applications use its HTTP API to create Linux environments, run commands, stream their output and manage each sandbox's lifecycle.
Perplexity announced the open-source release on 15 October 2026. The code is on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 licence, which allows commercial use and modification.
Yes. Perplexity says it replaced its commercial sandbox provider with SPACE in July 2026, and SPACE now runs the workspaces behind Perplexity Computer, its personal agent product launched in February. Techzine reports that it creates millions of sandboxes a day and, by Perplexity's comparison on the same production traffic, starts them three to five times faster than the previous provider.
Each sandbox is a small virtual machine with its own operating system, so there is an isolation boundary between the agent's work and the host. SPACE treats the sandbox itself as untrusted and manages network access and platform-held credentials outside it, so agents can reach authorised services without those credentials sitting in their working environment.
Possibly. The repository includes an E2B compatibility wrapper that works with the tested E2B Python SDK, with documented limitations. The native API is HTTP plus server-sent events, so you do not need to write Rust to use it.
The documented setup deploys SPACE to a local Kind Kubernetes cluster. CoreWeave has published a guide for evaluating it on its Kubernetes service, but warns that this path is for evaluation, changes worker node configuration and runs node services with elevated privileges. Akamai says it has launched SPACE on its cloud, and Crusoe is adding it to its Managed AI Services.
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