Agent Sandboxing and Secure Code Execution: Matching Isolation Depth to Risk
· 11 min read
Most teams shipping LLM agents with code execution capabilities make the same miscalculation: they treat sandboxing as a binary property. Either they skip isolation entirely ("we trust our users") or they deploy Docker containers and consider the problem solved. Neither position survives contact with production.
The reality is that sandboxing exists on a spectrum with five distinct levels, each offering a different isolation guarantee, performance profile, and operational cost. The mismatch between chosen isolation level and actual risk profile is the root cause of most agent security incidents — not the absence of any sandbox at all.
