nono.sh often ends up in comparison articles where its pitched against microVMs, within a very loose rag-tag bunch known as "Agent Sandboxes" - but the truth is, this is like comparing the fly-by-wire limits built into an aircraft control system to an end-of-runway concrete barrier - one governs every control input from within, in real time; the other stops things outside from going wrong when the plane runs out of runway.
A microVM guards the host. What happens inside, is not really its concern or duty to protect . If data is exfiltrated to unknown endpoints, destructive tool calls are made, an agent malfunctions and racks up eye-watering LLM api costs, and then deletes your database - you can't really blame the VM. You got what you signed up for - strong, monolithic, isolation. Not internal governance.
So nono operates at a completely different point in the security model: inside. It enforces capability-based, fine-grained policy, to intercept sensitive or destructive operations, and it audits what the agent is actually doing with tamper resistant , cryptographic claims (the blackbox recorder!). The question isn't "how contained is the damage" - it's "does the agent get to do this at all, in this particular context."
They answer different questions entirely: A VM answers, "if malicious code executes, how do we contain the blast radius from breaching the host and adjacent tenants?" nono answers, "how do I give the agent some authority to use a tool to access AWS credentials and call its APIs, but not allow the same access when its curl using the POST method to send your production credentials in a payload to a public github issue.
Docker not long back announced "we launched Docker Sandboxes with a bold goal: to deliver the strongest agent isolation in the market." That's Great! However, it's not really what your AI weary CISO needs to sleep better at night. Instead, it's resolving a problem that's already mostly solved - in a claimed, much stronger way. AI agents aren't highly focused on breaking isolation, something very difficult to achieve; they want to steal keys and cause wreckage from the inside. Want to see what the future malicious agent looks like? Go check out TeamPCP and their recent pursuits - they aren't bypassing hardware-level isolation with a zero-day, they're letting npm install do the job by executing a post-install scripts to exfiltrate your CI tokens.
BUT - they also harmonise and are formidable when combined - which is why teams and orgs are now deploying nono directly onto AWS Fargate / Firecracker, and hardened Kubernetes bound images - one holds the perimeter; the other governs what runs inside it. You get to sleep a bit easier at night.
If you interested in learning more and working with us to help shape a new approach for a new threat - we are now accepting a limited number of design partners to help us shape the future of AI Agent Security.