Abhishek Bhardwaj

From fork() to Fleet: Designing an Agent Sandbox Cloud — Abhishek Bhardwaj, OpenAI

Jul 13, 2026 · 44:34

Abhishek Bhardwaj from OpenAI explains the design of a secure, scalable agent sandbox cloud, arguing that microVMs (like Firecracker and Cloud Hypervisor) provide the strongest isolation for running untrusted AI-generated code despite performance trade-offs, and that persistent disk storage is the next frontier for unlocking long-running, stateful agent tasks. He compares runtime isolation technologies from simple fork-exec to containers (with namespaces and cgroups) to gVisor, and advocates for hardware-backed virtualization via microVMs to prevent guest exploits from reaching the host kernel. For persistence, he details incremental block-level snapshotting using copy-on-write filesystems and always-on distributed filesystems, enabling reliable checkpointing and Monte Carlo-style exploration. Orchestration challenges include low-latency sandbox creation through pre-warming or memory snapshots, and intelligent routing based on cached snapshot layers to minimize restore time. The talk positions storage and fast snapshot restore as key enablers for advanced agent capabilities, such as long-horizon tasks and failure recovery.

Arrakis: How To Build An AI Sandbox From Scratch - Abhishek Bhardwaj, OpenAI

Jun 3, 2025 · 40:18

Abhishek Bhardwaj, founder of Arrakis, explains why MicroVM-based AI sandboxes are the next unlock for AI agents, detailing how Arrakis provides secure, fast code execution and computer-use environments. He argues that sandboxes are essential for tool-calling models, reinforcement learning, and multi-tenant security, with Arrakis booting in under 7 seconds and supporting backtracking via snapshot/restore. The talk covers the choice of Cloud Hypervisor over other VMMs, overlayFS storage with per-sandbox read-write layers, iptables-based networking, and a built-in code execution server. A demo shows Claude using Arrakis via MCP to build a collaborative Google Docs clone and then revert to a snapshot, illustrating how a full Linux sandbox enables agents to autonomously debug and iterate without extensive prompting.