The SPACE sandbox is open-sourced — and the repository lands same-day under Apache 2.0
From the AI digest for 2026-10-15
What happened: ~3:33 PM ET Oct 15, Arav Srinivas RT'd WSJ's Reed Albergotti: "Perplexity is open sourcing its sandbox, called SPACE, and has partners like Akamai, Coreweave and Crusoe in the big push for AI security" — topping it with the thesis: "Neoclouds can't just lease GPUs. They need to own the full agent inference platform: open-weight models (SGLang), fine-tuned models (Miles, River), and secure sandboxes (SPACE). We look forward to working with Coreweave, Akamai, Crusoe, and more partners." The checkable artifact landed in the same window: Perplexity's own post (relayed via an Arav RT, timestamped ~1:03 PM ET): "We're open sourcing SPACE, the sandbox platform that runs every task in Perplexity Computer. SPACE gives each agent task its own Firecracker microVM and controls credentials and outbound traffic from outside the VM. Available now under Apache 2.0" — with the repository at github.com/perplexityai/SPACE.
What's genuinely new: A development on two threads at once. On the Perplexity storyline, it executes the Sep 28 promise on record — "we intend to open source all of it" — made the day SPACE, "the sandbox running all of Computer," was revealed as the target of a month-long red-team (9 models, Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, Kimi K3, Gemini 3.1 Pro given root, results still pending); the operator paper is now public exactly where the red-team was pointed. On the agent trust and containment thread, this is the containment stack's first open-source sandbox layer: NVIDIA's Open Agent Safety Platform (OpenShell/Sentry) launched closed, while SPACE's code is in the open. The architecture detail in the official post is itself a datapoint — per-task Firecracker microVM isolation with credentials and outbound traffic controlled from outside the VM — and the Apache 2.0 license permits commercial reuse. Arav's framing widens the customer set beyond Perplexity's own Computer to neoclouds and AI-security partners. Same window, distribution layer: Perplexity's API is now available inside Lovable apps (~6:14 PM ET), "real-time answers from the web, with citations."
Watch: The still-owed red-team writeup (what broke with root access, promised Sep 28) — the repo landing does not retire it. Whether the Akamai/Coreweave/Crusoe integrations materialize, and whether SPACE adoption extends beyond Perplexity's surface. What, if anything, of the red-team findings gets fixed in the public code, per commit history.
Links: Arav Srinivas — SPACE open sourcing + neocloud platform framing (RT Reed Albergotti) · Perplexity — official SPACE open-source post, Apache 2.0, Firecracker microVM (Arav RT) · Arav Srinivas — Perplexity inside Lovable apps