Google plans Agent Compute Engine preview for cloud developers
Google says the service will give agents persistent, isolated computers, saving their state while idle and attaching service credentials outside the sandbox.
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Google says the service will give agents persistent, isolated computers, saving their state while idle and attaching service credentials outside the sandbox.
Google plans to make infrastructure behind its Gemini artificial-intelligence agents available to Google Cloud developers through Agent Compute Engine, with a preview scheduled for later in 2026. These agents are software that uses models and tools to perform tasks such as running code or managing an inbox. The service would provide each agent with a persistent, isolated computer for running code, using a browser and carrying out other tasks, The New Stack reported on October 22.
The infrastructure began inside Google, supporting its agents and model-training work. The announcement would extend it to customers as a managed service rather than requiring those customers to operate the underlying systems themselves.
Google describes the service as giving each agent session a small virtual machine, or microVM, isolated by hardware and dedicated to that session. This sandbox—a restricted computing environment—would let an agent run scripts, operate a browser without a visible window and execute code with full administrative control inside its own machine. Google says the resulting task loops could run for weeks.
Google’s engineers say traditional virtual machines offer control but take too long to start, suspend and resume for rapidly changing agent workloads. Their design also addresses the time agents spend waiting for a model or user: after a tool call finishes, the host saves the microVM’s state in a checkpoint. Google says the microVM then uses no active resources until the next call arrives.
According to Google’s architecture description, the microVM has no standard network interface. Its traffic passes through a proxy outside the sandbox. When an agent contacts another service, Google’s Agent Gateway checks the user’s permission and the sandbox’s identity, then attaches the service credential outside the sandbox.
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Google’s engineers explain the design with a hypothetical inbox agent that encounters an email containing hidden instructions to steal access keys. They say a model will usually ignore such instructions, but not always. The design therefore assumes an attacker could control everything inside the sandbox and aims to leave no service credentials there to steal.
Agent Compute Engine would join an established market in which Google already offers sandboxes. The New Stack describes different approaches from AWS, E2B and Daytona; these features do not establish that one provider’s security is stronger than another’s.
| Provider | Isolation and operation | Pausing, billing or duration |
|---|---|---|
| AWS — Bedrock AgentCore | A separate microVM for each agent session. | Sessions last up to eight hours. CPU charges stop while an agent waits for a model or tool, but memory remains billable until reclaimed. Separate runtime instances added in August can keep shared sessions alive for up to 14 days. |
| E2B | Sandboxes run in Firecracker microVMs, using open-source virtualization technology developed by AWS. | Can preserve memory and files while paused, then resume in about one second. |
| Daytona | Added microVM sandboxes in July after starting with containers. | Can pause a full machine or create identical copies of a running one. |
Agent Compute Engine is separate from Agent Substrate, Google’s existing open-source runtime first announced in May. Google says Substrate runs on any Kubernetes cluster—a group of computers managed with Kubernetes software. It also saves an idle agent’s memory and attaches credentials outside the sandbox, giving teams an option other than the planned managed service.
Google plans to open Agent Compute Engine to Google Cloud users in preview later in 2026.
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