Akamai launches Agent Sandbox to contain code written by AI agents

AI agents are getting good at writing their own code. The harder question is where that code is allowed to run. Akamai’s answer, unveiled on Tuesday, is a sealed box. The company launched Agent Sandbox, an isolated environment where code produced by an AI agent can execute without reaching the rest of a company’s systems. The product is in beta. It shipped alongside Akamai Inference, a managed service for running open AI models on Akamai’s cloud, which is also in beta. The timing is not subtle. Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Okta and Zscaler have all either acquired or rolled out AI-agent security products this year, and Akamai is now stepping onto a crowded stage. How the sandbox works Technically, the isolation is built on WebAssembly. Akamai uses the open-source Spin framework, running inside its Akamai Functions product, to wall off each piece of agent-generated code. WebAssembly is a compact format for running programs in a tightly restricted environment. Put simply, the code gets only the permissions it is explicitly handed, and nothing more. Akamai says the sandbox places strict limits on outbound access. It also caps how much compute and memory a given task can con...