Making SPACE: Secure and efficient runtimes for long-running agents

Perplexity introduces SPACE, a sandbox platform designed for long-running, stateful AI agent workflows that require secure access to code execution, filesystems, networks, and multi-step task environments. Unlike conventional container-based systems, SPACE uses per-sandbox virtual machines to provide separate guest kernels and stronger isolation, while a controlled in-VM daemon manages filesystem, process, and platform interactions. Its three-layer architecture combines a stateless control plane, node-local services for lifecycle, storage, credentials, and networking, and isolated VM-based sandboxes. Security measures include restricted communication paths, centralized egress enforcement, external credential storage and injection, audit controls, and customer-managed encryption keys. SPACE supports agent features such as rapid creation, persistence, pausing, recovery, rollback, forking, and migration through disk and full-VM snapshots, while btrfs copy-on-write storage, warm template pools, and deduplicated image downloads reduce resource use and startup time. Perplexity reports that SPACE, now powering all Computer sessions, handled millions of sandbox creations and improved median sandbox creation latency from 185 milliseconds to 60 milliseconds, with the platform intended to expand to additional environments including Windows and local machines.

Use this post, company, and trend context to find content marketing opportunities, perform competitive analysis, or address product feature gaps via the Plushcap MCP server or the Plushcap API.