In just a short time, we’ve seen AI transition from simple chat interfaces to autonomous agents capable of function calling, code execution, and persistent terminal use. But to orchestrate these capabilities securely, agents need more than just intelligence — they need a robust, hyper-scalable, secure compute environment in which to execute code.
Since our preview announcement of GKE Agent Sandbox at KubeCon NA in November 2025, the community adoption has rapidly accelerated: we have seen more than 16x growth in sandboxes on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) in less than 5 months.
We’ve worked with key customers like Langchain and Lovable, and many others who are rapidly deploying millions of agents into production. Since its unveiling, Agent Sandbox has evolved rapidly, moving from a new project to a mature product with stable APIs. This stability is now fueling its integration into the broader agent ecosystem, where it serves as a critical infrastructure layer.
Today, we are excited to build on this momentum in two ways:
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GKE Agent Sandbox is now generally available, giving you a secure, scalable foundation for your agent workloads
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Introducing Agent Substrate, a new open source project aimed at continuing to push the limits of agentic infrastructure density
Secure, low-latency execution at scale
Agent Sandbox is an open-source, cloud-native execution environment built on Kubernetes, designed specifically for the unique demands of AI agents. It provides the foundational infrastructure to empower builders to safely and securely execute untrusted logic on top of their own infrastructure with industry-leading speed and efficiency.
With this release, we are delivering on the core requirements of modern agent workloads:
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Reduce idle compute with pod snapshots: Agents often have short bursty cycles followed by longer idle periods. Instead of wasting valuable compute to keep the agent running, GKE Agent Sandbox integrates with Pod Snapshots to suspend your idle agent workloads and resume them in seconds upon request.
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Low latency sandbox provisioning: Initializing a new sandbox instance for every request introduces unwanted seconds of cold start latency. GKE Agent Sandbox introduces a Sandbox API with an integrated warm pool. The Agent Sandbox API’s integrated warm pool enables GKE to allocate 300 sandboxes per second, per cluster, at sub second latency, with 90% of allocations completing in 200 milliseconds.
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Cost-effective warm pool: GKE Agent Sandbox warm pools keep pre-provisioned replicas ready to minimize sandbox startup latency. To minimize the cost of maintaining a sandbox warm pool, Agent Sandbox is integrated with standby capacity buffers (suspended VMs) to provide a cold pool of suspended sandboxes that can quickly replenish the warm pool for a fraction of the cost.
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Ironclad security & isolation: Agent Sandbox natively supports gVisor and default-deny Kubernetes network policy. Agent Sandbox provides pluggable interfaces for open source sandboxes like Kata Containers, enabling users to customize their kernel isolation.
As the demand for compute continues to rise, this release ensures our customers have access to the broad range of Google Cloud compute options. GKE Agent Sandbox delivers up to 30% better price-performance when running on Axion processors than comparable hyperscaler cloud providers.
The next revolutionary step forward in agentic infrastructure Agentic workloads are simultaneously scaling up to the 10s to 100s of millions of instances while at the same time becoming increasingly idle, waiting for human interactions, events or triggers. These workloads continue to demand strong kernel and network isolation, making dense scheduling a challenge. Handling this level of scale and rapid suspend-and-resume is pushing the limits of the Kubernetes control plane.That’s why we are introducing Agent Substrate, a new open source project aimed at addressing the performance and density needs of ultra scale agents.
Agent Substrate introduces a new level of abstraction that moves agents onto and off of ready compute capacity (running in Kubernetes, of course) in real-time. Agent Substrate takes the core secure runtime and snapshotting capabilities of Agent Sandbox and pairs them with a minimal control plane designed to bypass some of the limitations of Kubernetes, without reinventing the rest of it.
This lets Agent Substrate optimize the critical paths to offer lower latency with higher scale and efficiency. While standard Kubernetes is optimized to handle thousands of long-running services, Agent Substrate is designed for the chatter of millions of sub-second tool calls that would otherwise overwhelm a standard control plane. It provides the perfect foundation for Agents, Agent Harnesses and Agent Runtimes, including the new Agent Executor project.
