Aravind Srinivas

Our security team spent the last month trying to break SPACE, the sandbox platform that runs all of Perplexity Computer. We gave 9 models (Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, Kimi K3, Gemini 3.1 Pro, etc.) root access inside the VM; in some runs, the full sandbox source code too. We asked them to either escape to the host or reach a URL our network policy blocks. None of them got out of the VM in 108 runs. But once we allowed a bit of network access (just PyPI and Ubuntu mirrors so that they could install packages), 4 models managed to reach the blocked URL by: 1. Spoofing DNS responses to our gateway and using the fact that http://pypi.org sits on a Fastly IP shared with thousands of other sites. 2. GPT-5.6 Cyber went through Taboola's image fetcher to a screenshot service and then OCR'd the flag out of the image. We fixed both issues and made sure the reruns held. We also tested 10 other sandbox providers, and 8 of them had the same IP-sharing problem, eg E2B, Vercel, Modal. Openly sharing the red teaming research is the best way to build guardrails as an industry, and we look forward to working together with @nvidia to incorporate the guardrails into their Open Agent Safety Platform announced today. https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/escaping-space-part-i