Google Cloud unveils Agent Compute Engine microVM sandboxes and expanded agent governance

At AGNTCon + MCPCon, Google Cloud introduced Agent Compute Engine, a managed sandbox service built on the open-source Agent Substrate (ate.dev, released for Google Kubernetes Engine on 15 September 2026) and Google’s custom Titanium Infrastructure Processing Units (IPUs).

MicroVM isolation and state persistence

Every agent session runs inside its own hardware-backed microVM managed by Cloud Hypervisor, providing a dedicated kernel boundary against prompt-injected shell commands or untrusted code execution. Titanium IPUs offload network and storage I/O from the host CPU, while copy-on-write memory sharing deduplicates base runtime pages across concurrent sandboxes and snapshots memory state so paused agents release compute while waiting on user input or external APIs, then restore into persistent Hyperdisk storage.

On GKE, the underlying Agent Substrate architecture delivers up to 10 times higher compute density and sub-500ms suspend-and-resume latencies at 500 activations per second across 200k agents.

Governance and security controls

Google Cloud also detailed governance updates across Gemini for business: an Agent Gateway and Agent Registry with cryptographic SPIFFE Agent Identity, OpenTelemetry traces in Cloud Monitoring, Envoy-based cross-cloud policy enforcement, local endpoint sandboxes for Claude Code and Antigravity CLI, and token budget rules that downgrade routine tasks to lower-cost models. Agent Compute Engine enters preview in the coming months; Google Cloud has not announced pricing.