Google Launches Agent Sandbox on GKE and Open-Sources Agent Substrate
Google has made Agent Sandbox on GKE generally available—a Kubernetes-native environment for securely running AI agent code with isolation, fast cold starts, warm pools, pod snapshots, and real-time autoscaling. The release signals a shift from conversational agents to ones that call functions, execute code, and operate in terminals, requiring dedicated infrastructure beyond simple chat.
Alongside the sandbox, Google introduced Agent Substrate, an open-source project designed for ultra-scale agent workloads handling millions of short-lived tool calls, where standard Kubernetes hits latency and control-plane bottlenecks.