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About BoxLite

BoxLite is a microVM runtime for AI agents. It ships in two forms that share one SDK surface and one core API: an Apache 2.0 library you embed and run yourself, and a managed cloud that runs the same boxes on our fleet.

The runtime

A box is a real virtual machine with its own Linux kernel, isolated in hardware — KVM on Linux, Hypervisor.framework on macOS, WSL2 on Windows — rather than a shared-kernel container. That distinction is the point rather than a detail: code an agent wrote is untrusted code, and container escape is a different risk class from VM escape.

Images are where the two forms differ: run the runtime yourself and any OCI image works unmodified, while the managed cloud currently offers a curated set. Boxes boot in milliseconds either way, and their state (packages, files, environment) survives stop and restart or can be snapshotted and forked copy-on-write.

Open source and cloud

The open-source runtime is the whole runtime, not a demo tier. It runs in-process with no daemon, no control plane, no account and no data leaving the machine, which is what makes it usable on a laptop, in CI, on-premise or air-gapped. It is Apache 2.0, and developed in the open.

BoxLite Cloud runs those same boxes as a hosted service, reached over a REST URL with an API key. It adds the operational parts you would otherwise build yourself: managed volumes that outlive the box that created them, idle-stop with wake-on-access so you are not babysitting lifecycles, and capacity you do not provision. Moving between the two is a change of endpoint, not a rewrite.

Built for agents to read directly

Most developer sites are written for a human who will then write the integration. BoxLite publishes machine-readable descriptions of itself so an agent can do it unaided: /llms.txt for a summary of what BoxLite is and where everything lives, and /agent.md for a complete guide to the Cloud API — one whose code samples are executed against the live service before every release, so a sample that no longer works fails the build rather than reaching an agent.

Pages on this site also answer to Accept: text/markdown if you would rather read them without the HTML.

Where to go next

← Back to BoxLite