Perplexity Open-Sources SPACE: A Firecracker MicroVM Sandbox for Secure AI Agents

Perplexity has open-sourced SPACE, the sandbox platform that powers every task in Perplexity Computer. SPACE gives each agent task its own Firecracker microVM, with credentials and outbound traffic controlled from outside that VM. The code is available under the Apache 2.0 license on GitHub. For teams building coding or browsing agents, this represents a production-tested isolation layer they can now self-host.

TL;DR

• Size: A Rust codebase, release 0.8.0, serving as the public baseline. It exposes an HTTP API plus server-sent events.
• Runs on: A Linux x86_64 host with KVM, /dev/kvm, btrfs, and Docker. Supports local Kind (Kubernetes) or direct mode. No macOS support.
• Performance: In production, median create latency fell significantly, as detailed in Perplexity's engineering blog on secure and efficient runtimes for long-running agent tasks.

As of 2026, agentic AI workloads increasingly demand strong isolation and credential control — SPACE addresses both by design.

via MarkTechPost