The Scoop

Perplexity is giving away the software it has been using to combat rogue AI agents, the company told Semafor Thursday.

Its “AI sandbox,” which it calls SPACE, is now an open source project, allowing outside developers to use the tool, which it says can keep AI agents contained. Perplexity said it’s lined up partners, including CoreWeave, Akamai and Crusoe, which have agreed to offer SPACE to customers.

Sandboxes, or isolated environments for testing and running AI models, have become a hot topic in the tech industry in the wake of reports from AI labs of models escaping their constraints, finding their way onto the open web and hacking unsuspecting victims like Hugging Face and the Australian government.

While AI companies focus on “alignment,” or training models to behave themselves, the security industry has been increasingly advocating erecting strict guardrails around AI models.

“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.”

Perplexity said it tested SPACE by giving nine frontier models instructions to try to break out. In 118 tries, none of them did, while Perplexity found they were able to break out of other sandboxes that were not open sourced.

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Braniecki likened the effort to make SPACE open source to what happened with web browsers as the internet developed — companies came together to build guardrails that allowed secure browsing and online commerce. “Right now, we’re thinking too small,” he said.

Other companies like Nvidia have also released open-source security tools, such as Nvidia OpenShell, which runs AI agents in a sandbox and limits what they can reach.

Perplexity said SPACE also helps reduce wasted compute, which can be a byproduct of strict sandboxing.