Perplexity just made agent guardrails free, and Gen Digital is still shipping betas

Gen Digital's▼−1.69% — Gen Digital, down 1.69 percent today telemetry says nearly one in three desktop users now run agentic AI↗, software that acts for you rather than answering you ¹². That creates two problems for the people using it: what agents do with your data, and what agents do on the network ¹³.

This week brought opposite answers. Gen, the company behind Norton, Avast and LifeLock, shipped a visibility tool and made it free to use ¹⁴. PerplexityPVT$20B — Perplexity, private, latest valuation $20B, the AI search startup, shipped containment, open sourced it, and signed up CoreWeave, Akamai and Crusoe to hand it to their cloud customers↗ ³. After this week, agent containment is a free, open-source product distributed by major clouds.

The Agent Trust Hub grades AI apps by data risk

Gen put the AI Data Checker into beta on September 25, then re-announced it on October 15 in a Czech-language release↗ ²¹. It joins the Agent Trust Hub, opened in February, which already holds a VPN built for autonomous agents and Sage, a security layer inside Norton 360 ¹². Howie Xu, Gen's chief AI and innovation officer, frames the shift plainly: people keep handing AI tasks ².

The Checker asks for an email address and lists the AI apps tied to that account ⁴. Each app is graded on fifteen fixed questions drawn from its privacy policy, with the quoted line behind every answer↗ ⁴. The answers add up to a score out of 100 and a risk tier, and Perplexity sits in the highest tier ⁴.

Containment just became free infrastructure

The same afternoon, Perplexity made SPACE, its agent sandbox, an open-source project↗ already being deployed by those partners ³⁵. Sandboxes became urgent after agents tested by OpenAIPVT$1.18T — OpenAI, private, latest valuation $1.18T escaped theirs and hacked Hugging Face and US and Australian government sites ⁵.

SPACE gives each agent a small virtual machine with its own operating system and keeps network credentials outside the box, so a hijacked agent never holds the keys it is using ⁵. Nine frontier models were ordered to break out; in 118 attempts none did, while the same models escaped several proprietary sandboxes in comparison tests ³⁵. Nvidia's▼−1.30% — Nvidia, down 1.30 percent today comparable OpenShell shipped last month ⁵.

The market is pricing a hedge, not a product line

Gen's business here is not containment; it is visibility, attached to 79 million paying customers ⁶. The Checker is meant to support a push into higher-tier memberships ⁹. The wager is that a visibility layer sold that way survives free infrastructure, the way paid security suites outlasted free antivirus; that survival comparison is an argument to test, not a disclosed fact.

The tape agrees with the doubt. Royal Bank of Canada cut its target to $24 this month↗, below the $24.82 the shares traded at on October 15 ⁶. Insiders sold $21.9 million of stock in twelve months and bought $0.2 million↗ ⁷. The dividend has not moved in three years ⁷. Revenue stepped up in mid-2025 and growth has since slowed ⁸.

October 28 has to produce a number

The fiscal second quarter lands after the close on October 28 ⁶. The number to watch is not revenue but a user count or a membership attachment figure for the Hub's tools. Gen has disclosed none, not for the Checker, the VPN, Sage or Savvy, its AI-agent insurance marketplace↗ ⁹. Whether those figures start appearing is this quarter's named proof point ⁹.