By Diego Almada Lopez
Publication Date: 2026-10-15 16:50:00
Perplexity AI has released the code behind SPACE, the internal sandbox that keeps its AI agents in a locked room while they work. The company announced on October 15, 2026, that the platform is now available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license.
The name stands for Sandboxed Platform for Agentic Code Execution. The job is simple: let autonomous software run code without letting it touch anything it shouldn’t.
What SPACE actually does
Under the hood, SPACE is built on Firecracker microVMs, a virtualization technology developed by AWS. A microVM is a stripped-down virtual machine that offers the isolation of a full computer while starting up far faster than a traditional one.
Rather than relying only on software boundaries inside a shared operating system, each sandbox is separated at a deeper layer of the stack.
Perplexity reports a median sandbox creation latency of approximately 60 milliseconds. That is down from 185 milliseconds previously, roughly a two-thirds cut in wait time.
SPACE also supports stateful features: sandboxes can be paused and resumed. The platform also keeps rolling snapshots for up to one week, so a long-running task does not have to start from scratch after an interruption.
On the credentials front, SPACE supports bring-your-own-key (BYOK) encryption. Credentials are injected only at the moment they are needed and are never stored inside the sandbox itself.
Stress-tested before release
Perplexity did not open source…
