Perplexity open-sources SPACE, the agent sandbox behind Computer

SPACE is the isolation layer Perplexity built for its Computer agent, and it is now available as open source. Perplexity's red team reports no virtual-machine escapes across 108 adversarial runs. It also found that four models managed to get around network egress rules, which is an honest admission that containment is layered rather than absolute. In the same exercise, 7 of 9 competing sandboxes were bypassed.

The release fits a strategy CEO Aravind Srinivas spelled out on X. He argues that neoclouds 'can't just lease GPUs' and must instead own the full agent inference platform: open-weight serving (SGLang), fine-tuned models, and secure sandboxes. He named CoreWeave, Akamai and Crusoe as prospective partners.

The timing matters. The week's biggest HN thread (939 points) argued that AI 'hacking' incidents come from labs skipping containment basics rather than from rogue agents. Anthropic's warning about self-replicating AI worms also pushed sandboxing into the mainstream conversation, and AWS shipped its own open-source agent sandbox, Strands Box, this week.

The main caveat is that the escape statistics come from Perplexity's own red team and the comparison set of rivals isn't fully disclosed. Independent reproduction will decide whether SPACE becomes a standard.