Now that all four major public clouds have shipped a managed agent sandbox, they have also confirmed there is no shared blueprint for one. That is the argument The New Stack lands in a survey piece published on July 24, using Google Cloud's Cloud Run sandboxes public preview, announced at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress earlier this month, as the news peg.
The short version, per the survey: AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Cloudflare each offer a service that will run code produced by an AI agent under isolation the vendor manages for you. Each one is a different product. Each one, the piece argues, is built on a different foundation. That fragmentation is the story.
What "agent sandbox" is trying to do
Set aside the marketing labels. The problem all of these products address is the same. An AI agent generated some code, and something needs to execute it without handing over the developer's credentials, the developer's filesystem, or the cluster the developer's laptop is signed into. Traditional CI runners were designed to run code humans wrote and reviewed. A code generator does not necessarily produce code anyone read before it ran.
The choice that separates the products is which isolation layer sits between the agent-authored code and the host. It is the same choice CI engineers have been making for years for build isolation: containers, microVMs, syscall-filtering runtimes, WebAssembly, or a JavaScript-runtime isolate. Every option is a different trade between startup latency, blast radius, and how much of the host kernel the guest gets to see.
