Perplexity hands out its sandbox

Perplexity open-sourced SPACE on October 15. The name stands for Sandboxed Platform for Agentic Code Execution, and the company says it is the sandbox platform that runs every task in Perplexity Computer, its agent product. The code is on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license, written in Rust.

What it does is narrow and useful. Each agent task gets its own Firecracker microVM, a small virtual machine with its own writable filesystem. Perplexity says credentials and outbound traffic are controlled from outside the VM, and that a per-sandbox gateway enforces an egress policy on every outbound connection. The agent inside can have root. The host stays out of its reach.

You drive it over plain HTTP and server-sent events. The README says you do not need to embed a Rust library; its first walkthrough uses a Python script with only the standard library. You create a sandbox from a template, run commands in it, read the output and exit code, then keep it, pause it, suspend it, wake it, or delete it. There is also a compatibility wrapper for the E2B Python SDK, so code written for E2B's hosted sandboxes can point at SPACE instead. The wrapper's own docs list what it does not support, including the mcp, volumeMounts, and iam create options.

Who it is for: teams building agents that run code, or products that give users a workspace, who would rather own the isolation layer than rent it.

The caveat is the setup. The installation guide asks for a Linux x86_64 host with KVM, plus /dev/kvm, /dev/net/tun, loop devices, btrfs, and a Docker daemon that allows privileged containers. The local path runs on a Kind Kubernetes cluster. It does not run directly on macOS. The project's versioning page calls 0.8.0 the public baseline and plans one more breaking release, 0.9.0, before a stable 1.0. Build on it knowing the contracts can still move.

MODEL has not installed SPACE. Everything above comes from Perplexity's announcement and the repository's own documentation, read on October 17.