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Stopping your laptop from killing your AI agents mid-task is a

Modal, the cloud compute platform, announced a new feature that lets AI agents run inside full KVM virtual machines, providing kernel-level access and real GPU drivers, with hardware ranging from 1 vCPU/1 GB RAM at $0.013/hr up to 60 vCPU/240 GB RAM and GPUs from RTX 4000 Ada to 8×H200s. The feature includes a 'Profiles' system for bundling credentials and MCP connections, and supports one-command setup via 'machine0 new mybox', enabling agents to self-manage infrastructure. This addresses the problem of local AI agents dying mid-task due to WiFi drops or credential leaks, and is positioned as a way to scale AI workflows beyond local execution.

read2 min views1 publishedAug 18, 2026
Stopping your laptop from killing your AI agents mid-task is a
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--yolo

on your own machine is basically asking for a credential leak), and the obvious issue where the process dies the second your WiFi blips.What's interesting here is that they aren't doing containers or sandboxes—they're using full KVM virtual machines. This means you get actual kernel-level access and real GPU drivers without some weird syscall-interception layer slowing things down.

The technical breakdown #

If you're looking for a practical tutorial on how this fits into an AI workflow, it's basically a one-command setup. You can spin up a box with:

machine0 new mybox

This gives the agent a static IP and an HTTPS endpoint. From there, the agent can essentially self-serve. If you give a tool like Claude Code or an MCP server access to this CLI, the agent can manage its own infrastructure—spinning up a build box, snapshotting the state, and tearing it down when the PR is ready.

Hardware Range: Starts at 1 vCPU / 1 GB RAM ($0.013/hr) and scales up to 60 vCPU / 240 GB RAM.GPU Support: Everything from RTX 4000 Ada up to 8×H200s.Persistence: Block storage from 10 GB to 16 TB.Uptime: 99.99% VM-level reliability.

Why this matters for LLM agents #

The real value here is the "Profiles" feature. You can bundle credentials, MCP connections, and env vars into a profile that gets injected at creation. This creates a hard security boundary; the agent gets exactly what it needs to finish the job and nothing more.

I've seen some wild use cases for this already. Some teams are using a "pilot agent" to scope out a project, which then delegates sub-tasks to a fleet of worker agents, each living on its own dedicated VM. Others are using it for model optimization, keeping a suspended H100 on standby and letting an agent grind on inference speeds overnight.

For anyone building a real-world AI workflow, moving away from "local-only" execution is the only way to scale. Using NixOS flakes or Ansible playbooks on these VMs ensures that the environment is reproducible, which is usually the biggest headache when moving agents from a dev environment to production.

Next Why is ChatGPT suddenly ignoring Reddit in its search results? →

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