AWS open-sources Strands Box, an agent sandbox governed by Dogwood, a policy language with rules over an agent’s action history
Confirmed
The takeaway
On Oct 7, 2026 AWS released Strands Box (developer preview, Apache-2.0), an open-source sandbox that combines operating-system isolation with fine-grained policies on what an AI agent may do.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 10 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra160 days after its cutoff
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None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 99 days before it.
Key facts
- Published Oct 7, 2026 by Fernando Dingler (Principal Engineer, AWS) on the AWS Open Source blog; developer preview, Apache-2.0
- Two layers: OS-level containment (macOS Seatbelt) plus policy enforcement at network egress, the Python interpreter (Pydantic’s Monty), the shell interpreter (Strands Shell) and an MCP broker
- Dogwood: Cedar-syntax permit/forbid rules plus temporal operators over the action history and event patterns such as ::response{input.host: “slack.com”, output.status: 200}
- Example: an on-call agent investigating production incidents with read-only AWS credentials, rate-limited Slack posting and restricted network access
- Code: github.com/strands-agents/box, github.com/strands-agents/shell
What happened
AWS published Strands Box, an open-source sandbox for AI agents from its Strands Agents project, together with Dogwood, a policy language for agent actions. Rules can depend on what the agent did before, not only on the current action.
Why it matters
It arrived during a run of agent containment failures (OpenAI’s sandbox escapes, Anthropic’s agents reaching live websites during evals). History-aware policies (rate limits, “no X after Y”) address a gap in simple allow/deny lists for autonomous agents.
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 2 primary
Primary
- AWS Open Source Blog: Introducing Strands Box, AI agent sandboxes powered by Dogwoodaws.amazon.com, official
- GitHub: strands-agents/boxgithub.com, code
Changes
- Filed from data/leads.md