Perplexity has made its AI agent sandbox, called SPACE, an open source project, the company told Semafor on Thursday. The tool is designed to keep AI agents contained, and outside developers can now use it. Perplexity said partners including CoreWeave, Akamai and Crusoe have agreed to offer SPACE to their customers.
The move comes as sandboxes — isolated environments for testing and running AI models — have become a hot topic across the tech industry. AI labs have reported models escaping their constraints, reaching the open web and hacking targets such as Hugging Face and the Australian government.
How Perplexity tested SPACE
Perplexity says SPACE helps companies build secure AI agents, a problem many teams run into. "A lot of companies are thinking about how to build secure AI agents, and in many cases they hit a wall," said Zibi Braniecki, a member of the technical staff at Perplexity, in an interview with Semafor. "We have a solution."
The company tested the sandbox by giving nine frontier models instructions to try to break out. Across 118 attempts, none of them succeeded, according to Perplexity. The company says the same models were able to break out of other sandboxes that were not open sourced.
Braniecki compared the decision to open source SPACE to what happened with web browsers as the internet grew, when companies came together to build guardrails that made secure browsing and online commerce possible. "Right now, we're thinking too small," he said.
- SPACE is Perplexity's AI agent sandbox, now released as an open source project.
- Partners including CoreWeave, Akamai and Crusoe have agreed to offer SPACE to customers.
