Profile
Back to NewsBack
Hacker News 5 min
Reader Mode
Google's Open Agentic Orchestrator

Google's Open Agentic Orchestrator

1 hour ago
AX's pink axolotl mascot

Declare an agentic task. AX runs it at scale.

AX sandboxes your task, wires up its workspace, fences its network, and helps you run billions of them per cluster. Either use a single task per agent, or compose as many as your agent needs.

$ cat task.yaml
apiVersion: ax.io/v1alpha1
kind: Workspace
metadata:
  name: golang
spec:
  git:
    - repo: https://github.com/golang/go.git
      branch: "my-fix"
---
apiVersion: ax.io/v1alpha1
kind: Task
metadata:
  name: test
spec:
  workspaces:
    - name: golang
      goal: "Ensure that Go tool chain is available and is built from source"
  debug: true
$ ax apply -f task.yaml
workspace.ax.io/golang created
task.ax.io/test created
$ ax watch task test
Watching task default/test...
[10:42:01] Phase: Pending    Actor: test               WorkerIP:
[10:42:05] Phase: Running    Actor: test               WorkerIP: 10.20.3.67
Task reached terminal phase "Running".
$ ax get tasks
NAME   ATESPACE   PHASE     ACTOR   WORKER-IP    AGE
test   default    Running   test    10.20.3.67   5s
$ ax ssh test -- ls /workspace
go
$ ax ssh test -- cd /workspace/go && go build ./...
$ ax ssh test -- ps -o pid,cmd
  PID CMD
    1 /usr/local/bin/ax-task-runner
   12 go build ./...
$ ax ssh test -- touch notes.txt
$ ax suspend task test
task.ax.io/test suspended
$ ax resume task test
task.ax.io/test resumed
$ ax ssh test -- ls notes.txt
notes.txt
$ ax suspend task test
task.ax.io/test suspended
$ ax delete task test
task.ax.io/test deleted

How it works

Scales up to billions of tasks.

AX runs on top of Agent Substrate, a compute runtime designed from the ground up for massive density and fast stateful actor lifecycles.

Billions of tasks

Every task runs as a lightweight actor, allowing you to scale to billions of concurrent agent sessions per cluster without orchestrator limits.

Sub-second resumption

Idle agents waiting on model responses, external tool calls, or human responses are checkpointed, suspended, and brought back in under a second with zero cold-start delay.

Dense multiplexing

Dozens of tasks share worker resources, turning idle waiting time into spare compute capacity so you only pay when agents are actively thinking and running code.

Generative platform

Generative features built into the platform.

AX integrates generative AI directly into the platform. For example, if you want to set up a workspace just by explaining it in plain English, the environment is prepared automatically before your task starts.

task.yaml
apiVersion: ax.io/v1alpha1
kind: Task
metadata:
  name: data-analysis
spec:
  workspaces:
    - name: python-env
      goal: "Set up a Python 3 development environment"

Generative workspaces

Describe what a ready environment looks like in plain English. AX hands that goal to an agent on first boot to install toolchains and verify dependencies.

Run anything and everything

Interactive coding agents, long-running agent servers, Jupyter notebooks, headless browser testing, and custom tool runtimes—you name it.

Perfect for research

Spin up massive number of reproducible sandboxes to collect trajectories, run reinforcement learning loops, and evaluate agents at scale.

For builders & researchers

Built to be the most friendly runtime for developers and researchers.

We want to make dealing with agentic infrastructure easier so you can focus on your work. AX is designed with an uncompromising focus on ergonomics, rapid iteration, and joyful workflows for both application developers and AI researchers.

We aim to keep the runtime minimal and lightweight, while tastefully adding the essential features everyone needs to build, evaluate, and scale agents.

About

Born from research, built for production.

AX was born at Google when agentic runtime systems research met frontier compute. Over years of building and operating agentic execution engines, teams across Google recognized that agentic workloads represent an entirely new computing paradigm: stateful, bursty, long-running actors that compute intensely for a minute and then wait for model responses, tool responses, or human approval. Traditional orchestrators built for stateless microservices or predictable batch jobs become cost-prohibitive when keeping idle sandboxes running, yet lack native support for sub-second suspend and resume.

Drawing on agentic runtime research from Google DeepMind alongside deep experience in large-scale isolation, resumption, and scheduling, AX is being built as an open, declarative control plane purpose-built for agent execution. It abstracts tasks, workspaces, network policies, and models into core primitives so developers and researchers can run massive fleets of agents without reinventing the underlying infrastructure. This project heavily relies on Agent Substrate but provides agentic abstractions and generative runtime components.

Chat with me