Perplexity believes today’s most advanced models are already powerful enough to do extraordinary work. The problem is that chat boxes and single task agents only show a slice of that power. Even as models become more specialized, their strengths still sit in silos. Perplexity Computer is designed to pull advanced AI capabilities together into one coordinated system.
The company describes it as a general purpose digital worker. Unlike a chatbot that answers questions or an agent that completes a single task, Perplexity Computer is built to create and execute full workflows. It can run for hours or even months, breaking down a goal into tasks and subtasks, spinning up sub agents to handle research, document drafting, data processing or API calls.
Users envision an outcome, the system handles the rest.
Each task runs in an isolated compute environment with access to a real browser, filesystem and connected tools. If a subtask stalls, the system can generate additional agents to troubleshoot, search for information or write code. Work runs asynchronously, so users can step away or run multiple instances in parallel.
Under the hood, Perplexity is leaning into multi model orchestration. Instead of committing to one AI model family, it routes different tasks to whichever frontier model performs best at that job. At launch, it uses Opus 4.6 as its core reasoning engine, while delegating specialized work to models such as Gemini for research, Nano Banana for image generation, Veo 3.1 for video, Grok for lightweight speed tasks and ChatGPT 5.2 for long context recall and search.
The premise is that models are becoming specialists. The most capable system, Perplexity argues, is the one that can coordinate them all and give users control over which model handles which task. Perplexity frames this as a natural step in its evolution. After building its AI search engine and launching its AI native browser, Comet, the company has been layering in deeper research capabilities, persistent memory and task management. Perplexity Computer is positioned as the system that ties those pieces together.
