Verified project record

google/ax

AX is a declarative orchestrator for agentic tasks that runs on top of Agent Substrate, sandboxing agent execution and wiring up workspaces for running agents at scale. It expresses agent tasks, pre-wired workspaces, and model specs as ax.io/v1alpha1 YAML applied with a single command.

Project overview

It addresses the real pains of agent operations—state accumulation, strict isolation needs, calls to model APIs and tool servers, and runaway loops that burn money—by combining declarative Task, Workspace, and Model primitives with sandboxed execution on Kubernetes.

Project type: AI Agent · Infrastructure
Use cases: Automation
Deployment: Refer to project documentation
License: Apache-2.0

Best for

AI engineers and operations teams who run agent tasks on Kubernetes and need declarative, sandboxed orchestration of agent workspaces and model configuration.

Key capabilities

Express agent tasks, pre-wired workspaces, and model specs as ax.io/v1alpha1 YAML applied with a single command.
CLI with apply, get, describe, watch, delete plus agent-specific verbs like ssh, suspend, resume, talking to the control plane over gRPC.

Limitations and risks

AX and several features are in heavy development, with major breaking changes likely before a stable release.
Core concepts, protocols, and specifications are actively refined and will likely break before stable release—verify compatibility before building on AX.

Getting started

Setup is rated hard: it requires coding ability, a Kubernetes cluster with Agent Substrate already running, and configuration of which LLM the platform itself uses, with credentials from a Kubernetes secret. Interaction is via the CLI, which follows the active kube context.

Evidence and sources

GitHub project description: Agent Executor (AX) is Google's open agentic orchestration runtime
README: Configure which LLM the platform itself uses, with credentials from a Kubernetes secret | **`Model`**
README: AX and several of its features are in heavy development. We are actively > refining our core concepts, protocols, and specifications, and will likely > introduce major breaking ch…
README: AX schedules every task as a sandboxed actor on [Agent Substrate](https://github.com/agent-substrate/substrate), so Substrate must be running in your cluster before you deploy AX.
README: ax ssh task123 # interactive shell (task needs spec.debug: true)

Source updated at: 2026-10-21T18:08:09Z

Open original GitHub project