--- title: Sandboxes description: Isolated machines for running untrusted code and computer use, granted now and destroyed when the lease ends. type: tutorial product: sandboxes summary: One lease, one machine — what it is, what surrounds it, and how it ends updated: 2026-09-28 order: 0 --- A Lease is one isolated machine — a shape, a region, an image — for a bounded time. It is granted immediately, from a warm machine or a cold one, or refused with a typed reason. Sandboxes is the only writer of a lease: you describe the machine you want, and the platform hands you one. ## A lease is granted, not queued There is no queue. `create` answers when the guest is ready, and waits at most 60 seconds for that; with `skip_wait_ready` it answers as soon as the machine is granted. A request that cannot be served now is refused rather than parked, and `status.refusal` names which refusal it was: `no_capacity`, `no_matching_cell`, `shape_not_offered`, `shape_not_entitled`, `image_not_found` or `abuse_hold`. The trade is deliberate: nobody waits behind someone else's workload, and the caller owns the retry. A refusal is an answer, not a delay. ## The objects around a lease A lease names its shape, its image — a Kernel Artifact by digest, or a `template:` name — its `kind`, and its `ttl`. `kind` decides what the machine serves, and defaults to `general`; the other three, `browser`, `desktop` and `android`, are the ones with a display. ## The lease ends, and the machine is destroyed `release` ends a lease now. So does its `ttl`, a lease left unused past its `idle_timeout`, a budget, and a machine the platform loses — and `status.end_reason` says which of those happened. The end destroys the machine: it is never leased again, and its disk goes with it. A [volume](/docs/api/volumes) is the way work survives a lease. It is attached by name when the lease is created, detached when the lease ends, and destroyed only by its own Delete. Everything else you leave in a lease belongs to that lease. ## The scopes - `sandboxes:read` — the lease, its events, and the shape catalog. - `sandboxes:write` — everything that changes a lease: create, renew, pause, resume, release, its network policy, and the pools, volumes and snapshots around it. - `sandboxes:exec` — the data plane: `exec`, the files, the exposed ports, computer actions, the live view, and minting a lease token. ', mono: true }, ]} /> A lease’s name is a path, and the same path works in the API, the CLI and the console. The id is never reused.