ArcBox

ArcBox runs AI agents on real, isolated computers: every environment is a full virtual machine with its own kernel, filesystem and network, booting in under 100 milliseconds. Written in pure Rust on a microVM runtime, it gives agents and CI jobs a genuine machine to work in — not a container with shared-kernel compromises. The project has about 4,200 stars on GitHub and is under very active development in 2026.

Overview

The same isolated environment serves three lifetimes: a persistent Computer an agent can keep for months, a disposable Sandbox for untrusted code, and an ephemeral Runner for CI-style jobs. Disk and memory snapshots restore in about 22 ms, so a fleet of identical machines is one snapshot away, and every lifecycle event — created, ready, snapshotted, destroyed — streams to you instead of being polled. Each machine gets its own network identity and egress rules, nothing is mounted in from the host, and a single control plane exposes four verbs — create, exec, snapshot, destroy — identically through the CLI (abctl), SDKs and API. Linux and Windows environments are rolling out first, with macOS, iOS and Android following. The underlying runtime, ArcBox Core, is open source.

ArcBox is deliberately not a container runtime: by giving each environment its own kernel on a Rust VMM with VirtIO devices and a userspace network stack, it avoids the escape and noisy-neighbour classes of problems that make teams nervous about letting agents execute arbitrary code. Images are OCI-compatible, environments can be created from an OS, an image or a snapshot, and TTL-based teardown is built in for ephemeral work. The team publishes its performance measurements openly, including the methodology behind the boot and restore numbers.

Key Features

• True microVM isolation — own kernel per agent environment
• Sub-100 ms boot and ~22 ms snapshot restore of disk and memory
• One environment, three lifetimes: Computer, Sandbox and Runner
• Per-machine network identity with controlled egress and published ports
• Event-stream control plane with CLI, SDKs and API parity
• Pure-Rust, OCI-compatible and local-first

💳 Pricing

The ArcBox Core runtime is free and open source (MIT/Apache-2.0). The hosted Agent Computer platform is rolling out in waves — Freemium, with self-hosting always available.

Who Is It For

ArcBox is for agent builders, platform teams and CI engineers who need fast, strongly isolated machines for AI agents to compute in safely.