Perplexity Takes On Claude Cowork With Personal Computer, an Agentic AI Platform for Mac Mini

Perplexity unveiled the Personal Computer on Wednesday as an extension to the last month's Perplexity Computer platform. Unlike what the name suggests, it is not a hardware system, but a dedicated tool for Apple's Mac Mini that connects Perplexity Computer to a device, and allows it to access the local apps and files. With that, the multi-model agentic system can perform a wider range of complex tasks autonomously. The company's new offering also competes with other automation tools available in the market, such as Anthropic's Claude Cowork, Microsoft's Copilot Cowork, and OpenClaw.

Perplexity Unveils Personal Computer

In a blog post, the San Francisco-based AI firm announced Personal Computer. The company describes it as an agentic AI system that runs on a dedicated Mac Mini around the clock. It can connect to the user's local apps and Perplexity's servers. “Personal Computer is a digital proxy for you, working constantly on your behalf and allowing you to orchestrate all of your tools, tasks, and files from any device, anywhere,” the post added.

It is said to run in the company's secure servers with clear safeguards. The AI system will ask for approval before taking sensitive actions, and will provide a full audit trail for each session. Additionally, users will also have access to a kill switch that can be used to gain immediate control at any given time. Currently, the offering is only available to a limited set of users. Perplexity has also opened a waitlist for interested individuals to register.

To break it down, Perplexity Computer, which was released last month, was designed as a cloud-based agentic AI system that allows users to delegate web-based tasks. The system creates sub-agents that can work asynchronously. With Personal Computer, the same workflow gets connected to a dedicated Mac Mini, allowing it to take actions on the apps as well as local files.

Alongside, Perplexity also introduced Computer for Enterprise, Comet Enterprise, four new application programming interfaces (APIs): Search, Agent, Embeddings, and Sandbox, an upgraded Perplexity Finance, and integration of Statista, CB Insights, and PitchBook as Premium Sources.