Code-Execution

If you’re building AI agents that execute code — whether it’s a coding agent running tests, a data analysis pipeline spinning up Python interpreters, or a multi-agent system that needs isolated environments per task — the sandbox you pick directly determines your cost structure, your latency profile, and how much state management code you have to write yourself. Three providers dominate this space in 2026: E2B, Modal, and Fly.io. Each one has a fundamentally different pricing model, cold start story, and persistence strategy. I’ve been running production agent workloads on all three for the past six months, and the differences are bigger than the marketing suggests. ...

On April 15, 2026, OpenAI shipped Agents SDK v2 with seven native sandbox providers baked directly into the framework — Blaxel, Cloudflare, Daytona, E2B, Modal, Runloop, and Vercel. That single release turned sandbox selection from a niche infrastructure decision into a routine engineering choice that every AI agent team now has to make. Three providers dominate early conversations: E2B, Daytona, and Blaxel. Each is production-ready, each has native SDK integration, and each is built around a fundamentally different runtime model. This article breaks down exactly where they diverge, which workload profile each one is optimized for, and how to pick the right one without running a month of expensive benchmarks. ...