Agent Substrate is a security-hardened, zero-trust runtime for running large numbers of sandboxed agents on standard Kubernetes.
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It maps many stateful actors onto a small pool of warm workers, snapshots idle actors out of memory and restores them on request, and keeps credentials outside the sandbox. Google donated it to the CNCF alongside gVisor in November 2026.
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Every actor runs in a gVisor or microVM sandbox with segregated compute, network and storage
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Short-lived per-actor SPIFFE identity and default-deny networking
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Egress gateway (`atenet-egress`) injects credentials outside the sandbox so agents never hold API keys
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Snapshots RAM and filesystem state of idle actors and resumes them in under 500 ms
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10x to 30x oversubscription of stateful actors onto warm worker pods
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Harness agnostic: hosts ADK, LangChain, Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity and sandboxed MCP servers
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Base layer for Google AX (Agent Executor) and kagent
Open Source
Free and open-source under the Apache License 2.0; you pay for your own Kubernetes cluster, compute, storage and model usage.
Best for
Platform teams that need to run many untrusted, mostly idle agents or coding sandboxes on Kubernetes with strong isolation, identity and credential controls.
Not ideal for
Individual developers or small teams without Kubernetes experience who just want to run a coding agent locally.
A serious, production-minded isolation layer for agent fleets; heavy to operate, but one of the strongest open options for running untrusted agents at scale.
v1.0.0 was released on Nov 5, 2026 with a public API and configuration compatibility commitment, and on Nov 6, 2026 Google announced it is donating Agent Substrate and gVisor to the CNCF.
As of
Is Agent Substrate free?+
Yes - Agent Substrate is Open Source. Free and open-source under the Apache License 2.0; you pay for your own Kubernetes cluster, compute, storage and model usage.
Is Agent Substrate open source?+
Yes - Agent Substrate is open source. Free and open-source under the Apache License 2.0; you pay for your own Kubernetes cluster, compute, storage and model usage.
Who is Agent Substrate best for?+
Platform teams that need to run many untrusted, mostly idle agents or coding sandboxes on Kubernetes with strong isolation, identity and credential controls.
Who is Agent Substrate not ideal for?+
Individual developers or small teams without Kubernetes experience who just want to run a coding agent locally.
What are the best Agent Substrate alternatives?+
The closest Agent Substrate alternatives on ai.dosa.dev are Jules by Google, OpenHands, SWE-agent - all listed under Autonomous & Async Agents.
Who makes Agent Substrate?+
Agent Substrate is developed by Google (donated to CNCF). It is listed in the Autonomous & Async Agents category on ai.dosa.dev.
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