Perplexity AI open-sources its secure AI agent sandbox SPACE

Artificial intelligence search engine startup Perplexity AI Inc. has decided to open-source its AI agent security tool called SPACE. This decision comes after several high-profile incidents where autonomous AI systems managed to escape from secure environments and cause havoc on third-party websites. The sandbox tool, SPACE, enables developers to secure their own systems by isolating AI agents in secure, isolated virtual environments.

Perplexity AI's Portable Computer agents, which are marketed as locally-hosted AI agents, are designed to perform tasks such as developing web applications, researching products, and online shopping. SPACE provides safety features such as isolated code execution, pause and resume, recovery, and session branching. Perplexity AI's engineers have tested the SPACE environment against nine frontier models, and none of them were able to break out of the sandbox in 118 attempts.

The open-source nature of SPACE is crucial for securing AI agents, as it allows companies to collaborate on creating robust guardrails. Perplexity isn't the only company working on open-source AI agent sandboxes; Nvidia's OpenShell project is also available for use.