Credit: Perpelexity

Last month Perplexity announced the confusingly named “Computer,” its cloud-based agent tool for completing tasks using a harness that makes use of multiple different AI models. This week, the company is moving that kind of functionality to the desktop with the confusingly named “Personal Computer,” now available in early access by invite only.

Much like the cloud-based version, Personal Computer asks users to describe general objectives rather than specific computing tasks—an introductory video shows Personal Computer’s questions in a sidebar asking things like, “Create an interactive educational guide” and “create a podcast about whales.” But Personal Computer, running on a Mac Mini, also gives Perplexity’s agents local access to your files and apps, which it can open and manipulate directly to attempt to complete those tasks.

That should sound familiar to users of the open source OpenClaw (previously Moltbot), which similarly allows users to let AI agents loose on their personal machines. From the outside, Personal Computer looks like a more buttoned-up, user-friendly version of the same concept, with an easy-to-read, dockable interface that can help users track multiple tasks. Perplexity users can also log in remotely to their local copy of Personal Computer, making it “controllable from any device, anywhere,” Perplexity says.

If the prospect of letting “a persistent, digital proxy of you” loose on your private local files is worrying to you, you’re not alone. Perplexity promises that Personal Computer operates in a “secure environment with clear safeguards,” that all “sensitive actions” require user approval, that it keeps a “full audit trail” of every session, and that the system has a “kill switch” to stop things from getting out of hand in the most extreme cases. Those are likely to be necessary safeguards, given the surprisingly widespread stories of OpenClaw and other AI tools causing (or nearly causing) irreparable damage when given similar access.

Without direct “early access” to Personal Computer, it’s hard to know just how well Perplexity’s offering moves this kind of agentic AI usage into something casual users can rely on in an everyday context on their local computer. But Perplexity isn’t alone in chasing that end goal; Nvidia is reportedly working on its own open source OpenClaw competitor, and there are plenty of startups and established brands setting up their own agentic AI tools with various levels of functionality.

Aside from Personal Computer, Perplexity also announced an Enterprise version of the cloud-based Computer agent, which can interact with various corporate apps through connectors. The company’s Search, Agent, Embeddings, and Sandbox platforms are also now available via API rather than through Perplexity’s standard interface.