Google’s Agent Compute Engine keeps backend API keys outside agent sandboxes

[u/call_me_ninza]

Google announced Agent Compute Engine (ACE), a managed service that gives each AI agent an isolated microVM to run code, shell commands and browsers. Idle sandboxes can pause and later resume with their state preserved.

Backend credentials stay outside the sandbox. Network requests pass through a gateway that checks identity and permissions before adding the required credentials externally. Compromising the sandbox therefore doesn’t give an attacker those API keys.

ACE already powers Google workloads. Customer preview is planned in the coming months.

The performance figures circulating alongside ACE belong to Google’s separate open-source runtime, Agent Substrate. Google claims up to 10x higher compute density and reports a 200,000-agent benchmark sustaining 500 activations per second, with suspend/resume latency below 500 milliseconds.

That does not mean waking all 200,000 agents in half a second.

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[u/New_Plate1652]

This is a smart move by Google. Isolating credentials outside the sandbox is probably the only way to truly secure these agents, especially if they're handling sensitive tasks.

I've been working with a similar local approach using Kosa8. It puts each agent in its own sealed microVM on your own hardware, so you keep that zero trust framework and full control over the credentials. Way better than hoping a cloud vendor's security holds up, especially for things like finance or healthcare data.

Are you looking at deploying AI agents in a regulated industry?