AI Sandbox

An AI sandbox is an isolated computing environment — a virtual desktop, container, or restricted process — where an AI agent can take actions without affecting your real machine, files, or accounts. Sandboxes are what make agentic AI safe enough to actually use. Three flavours: cloud sandboxes (Operator runs in OpenAI's cloud), container sandboxes (Anthropic Computer Use ships a Docker container), and process sandboxes (the agent runs as a restricted sub-process). Sandboxes protect against accidental data deletion, credential theft, unauthorised purchases, lateral movement, and privacy leaks. They don't protect against an agent falling for phishing or doing the wrong-but-not-malicious action. Never run an AI agent with your real OS user account.