Perplexity is open-sourcing SPACE — Sandboxed Platform for Agentic Code Execution — the containment layer that runs every task inside Perplexity Computer. Each agent task gets its own Firecracker microVM, and the company says it creates millions of sandboxes a day in production.
The number being quoted is the escape test: in 118 attempts against nine frontier models, none escaped. That is a meaningful result in a week when the EU AI Office and the FTC both opened inquiries into exactly this failure mode, and when the industry has logged more than twenty loss-of-control incidents this year. CoreWeave, Akamai and Crusoe have agreed to offer SPACE to their own customers.
Giving away security software is a positioning move as much as a technical one. Perplexity does not sell containment, so open-sourcing the layer costs it little and makes its infrastructure partners into a distribution channel — while putting competitors in the position of explaining why their sandbox is not public. Cybersecurity stocks dipped on the news.
Sources:
Perplexity ·
Semafor ·
SiliconANGLE