Computer

Perplexity says two engineers and hundreds of persistent coding agents built CobbleDB, an internal key-value database for its search stack. It is optimized for repeated batch reads of prepared page records and is not offered externally.

Perplexity launched Portable Computer in its Windows app for supported NVIDIA RTX systems. Local inference requires at least 24GB of VRAM, while the update also adds local MCP support and scheduled tasks.

Perplexity open-sourced Lily, a Rust and Metal engine for Qwen3.6-35B-A3B in Perplexity Computer's hybrid workflow. Perplexity reports 1.23× faster prefill and 1.35× faster decode on an M5 Max MacBook Pro.

Perplexity's Mac app can route sensitive agent steps to local models while using cloud models for other work. The company also open-sourced the PII classifier used to decide where work runs.

Perplexity’s Portable Computer runs its orchestrator, subagents, and harness locally on NVIDIA DGX Spark with a post-trained 27B model. Frontier-model escalation requires user approval and flags PII before text is sent externally.

Perplexity open-sourced Numbat to monitor desktop, CLI, IDE, and gateway agents before they act. The layer supports audit events, pre-action blocking, alerts, and forensic review.

Perplexity released WANDR, its internal benchmark for deep and wide research in Computer. The dataset has 500 tasks, 170,495 source-backed records and production-derived use cases.

Perplexity added Grok 4.5 as an orchestrator model in Computer for Pro, Max, and Enterprise users. Perplexity reported a WANDR score of 0.328 at $4.76 per trial, while outside security-review and canvas-task tests put it close to GPT-5.6 Sol on cost or token use.

Perplexity rolled out Brain, a self-updating context graph that carries prior sessions, files, and decisions into new Computer tasks. In research preview for Max users, it matters because Perplexity says the memory layer improves correctness and recall while lowering per-task cost on history-dependent work.

Perplexity made Deep Research a native skill inside Computer and tied it to the same harness, long-running sandboxes, tools, connectors, and licensed data. The update collapses multi-step research into one persistent agent interface instead of a separate mode.

Perplexity said Computer will split tasks between on-device models and frontier cloud models, keeping some data on the local machine while escalating harder work remotely. That matters for privacy-sensitive workflows and for reducing token-heavy cloud usage on laptop-class hardware.

Perplexity replaced one-shot search calls with Search as Code, a Python-based search runtime in its Agent API that is also now the default in Computer. The change matters because agents can batch, rank, filter, and aggregate search steps inside code, and Perplexity says the system scored 0.386 on WANDR versus 0.152 for the next system.

Independent IDEs, gateways, and agent runtimes rolled out Claude Opus 4.8 within hours of launch, including Cursor, Warp, OpenRouter, and Perplexity. That matters because teams can benchmark or swap the model into existing workflows without waiting for connector lag.

A week after Personal Computer launched on Mac, Perplexity added Snowflake as a live data source for Computer. The integration pushes the product into governed analytics workflows, while admins still control access, definitions, and shared data logic.

Perplexity released a new Mac app centered on Personal Computer, a local-first agent that works across local files, native Mac apps, and the web. It also supports remote control from iPhone and an always-on Mac mini setup paired with Comet.

Perplexity launched Professional Finance for Computer with licensed Morningstar, PitchBook, Daloopa, and Carbon Arc data plus 35 analyst workflows. The release matters because outputs are now designed to stay traceable to source documents instead of behaving like opaque chat answers.