Perplexity Open-Sources SPACE, a Firecracker MicroVM Sandbox for AI Agents

Perplexity has released SPACE as open-source software under the Apache 2.0 license. SPACE is the sandbox platform that powers every task in Perplexity Computer, the company's agentic product. Each agent task is assigned its own Firecracker microVM, providing hardware-level isolation between concurrent tasks.

A key design choice is that credentials and outbound network traffic are managed from outside the microVM rather than inside it. This means the agent code running within the sandbox cannot directly access secrets or make uncontrolled network calls, reducing the risk of credential leakage or data exfiltration by a compromised or misbehaving agent.

Firecracker, originally developed by Amazon for Lambda and Fargate, is a lightweight microVM manager that boots VMs in milliseconds with minimal overhead. Using it for agent sandboxing gives Perplexity strong isolation guarantees without the performance penalty of traditional full VMs, which is important when many agent tasks run concurrently.

The open-source release is notable because it gives the broader AI agent community a reference architecture for secure, isolated agent execution. As agentic AI systems gain access to tools, APIs, and credentials, sandboxing becomes a critical safety layer. SPACE provides a concrete, production-tested implementation that other teams can adopt or adapt for their own agent infrastructure.

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