Google's Agent Substrate Project: A New Control Plane for AI Agents
Google introduces GKE Agent Sandbox and Agent Substrate for AI agents, addressing Kubernetes limitations. A new control plane emerges.
In May 2026, Google launched GKE Agent Sandbox and introduced Agent Substrate. These projects acknowledge that Kubernetes is not the right control plane for AI agents. Agent Sandbox provides a secure environment for execution, while Agent Substrate adds a scheduling layer that routes around Kubernetes. Agents behave like long-running processes, indicating that Kubernetes's design is not suited for such workloads.