Perplexity open-sources its SPACE agent sandbox
Confirmed
The takeaway
On Oct 15, 2026 Perplexity said it was giving away SPACE (“Sandboxed Platform for Agentic Code Execution”), the sandbox that runs Perplexity Computer, as an Apache-2.0 open-source project.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 15 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra168 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5107 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Argon198 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7137 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 107 days before it.
Key facts
- GitHub: perplexityai/SPACE, Apache-2.0, ‘pluggable-runtime sandboxes for running agent and user code in isolation’ (repo created Oct 1, 2026; 286 stars on Oct 15 evening)
- Partners offering it to customers: CoreWeave, Akamai, Crusoe (Semafor)
- Perplexity’s test: 9 frontier models instructed to break out, 118 tries, no success; it says the same models broke out of other sandboxes that were not open source (company claim)
- Zibi Braniecki (Perplexity technical staff): ‘A lot of companies are thinking about how to build secure AI agents, and in many cases they hit a wall … We have a solution’; ‘Right now, we’re thinking too small’ (comparing it to shared web-browser security)
- Perplexity says SPACE also cuts wasted compute, a side effect of strict sandboxing
- Background: SPACE launched July 15, 2026 as Perplexity Computer’s runtime; Sept 28 ‘Escaping SPACE’ red-team reported 108 runs with 0 VM escapes
What happened
Semafor reported that Perplexity is open-sourcing SPACE, the sandbox it uses to keep AI agents contained, and that three cloud providers will offer it. The code sits in the Apache-2.0 repository perplexityai/SPACE. Perplexity framed the release as shared infrastructure, like the guardrails the industry built for secure browsing.
Why it matters
After several 2026 sandbox escapes by lab agents, containment has become a product category, with NVIDIA’s OpenShell, AWS’s agent sandbox and now an open SPACE. Perplexity’s breakout numbers are its own test and were not independently replicated.
Sources
3 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
3 sources: 2 primary, 1 press
Primary
- GitHub: perplexityai/SPACE (Apache-2.0)github.com, code
- Perplexity Research: Making SPACE secure and efficient runtimes for long-running agentsresearch.perplexity.ai, official
Press
- Semafor: Perplexity to give away its AI security softwaresemafor.com, press
Changes
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