Perplexity Unveils Personal Computer: An Always-On AI Agent Running on Mac Mini

Overview

Perplexity used its inaugural Ask 2026 developer conference — held inside a former church in San Francisco’s North Beach — to announce Personal Computer, a product that turns a Mac mini into an always-on AI agent with local access to a user’s files, applications, and sessions. The announcement, reported by 9to5Mac, marks a significant expansion for the company, which also unveiled Computer for Enterprise at the same event.

What Personal Computer Does

Personal Computer is a persistent extension of Perplexity Computer, the cloud-based multi-model agent system the company launched in late February. Where Perplexity Computer runs entirely in the cloud, Personal Computer bridges the gap to a user’s local machine. A Mac mini runs continuously, connected to both local applications and Perplexity’s remote servers, orchestrating 20 AI models as what the company describes as a “persistent digital proxy.”

The system gives Perplexity Computer and the Comet Assistant — Perplexity’s Chromium-based AI browser — always-on, local access to a machine’s files, apps, and sessions. According to 9to5Mac, Personal Computer connects to services including Gmail, Slack, GitHub, Notion, and Salesforce, monitoring triggers and executing tasks proactively across all of them. Users can control the system remotely from any device.

CEO Aravind Srinivas framed the product as a step toward a new computing paradigm. “A traditional operating system takes instructions; an AI operating system takes objectives,” he said at the conference, as reported by Axios.

Pricing and Availability

Personal Computer is available through a waitlist and restricted to Perplexity Max subscribers, the company’s highest-priced tier at $200 per month, according to Digital Trends. Subscribers receive 10,000 monthly credits for computational tasks. The product is Mac-only at launch.

Security Model

While Personal Computer runs continuously on local hardware, the AI processing itself still takes place on Perplexity’s secure servers, according to 9to5Mac. Sensitive actions require explicit user approval, all actions are logged, and a kill switch is available to halt the agent at any time.

Computer for Enterprise

Alongside the consumer product, Perplexity announced Computer for Enterprise at Ask 2026, directly targeting Microsoft Copilot and Salesforce in the corporate AI market, as reported by VentureBeat. Employees can query the system directly inside Slack channels and threads, then continue conversations in Perplexity’s web interface or mobile app.

The enterprise tier adds business-grade connectors for Snowflake, Datadog, Salesforce, SharePoint, and HubSpot on top of the existing 100-plus integrations. Administrators can also install custom connectors via the Model Context Protocol. The package includes SSO/SAML authentication, SCIM provisioning, granular admin controls, full audit logging, and SOC 2 Type II certification.

VentureBeat noted that the Snowflake and Datadog connectors may prove particularly significant, as they allow non-technical employees to query complex corporate data warehouses in plain English — bypassing the traditional bottleneck of waiting for data teams to write SQL queries or build dashboards.

What We Don’t Know

Perplexity has not disclosed when Personal Computer will move beyond the waitlist to general availability, or whether the product will expand to non-Mac hardware. The specific breakdown of the 20 AI models used in the orchestration system has not been publicly detailed. It also remains unclear how the 10,000 monthly credit allocation translates to real-world usage patterns, and whether the $200 monthly subscription will prove sufficient for power users running the agent continuously.

The long-term privacy implications of an always-on AI agent with persistent access to local files and connected services — even one with approval gates and logging — are likely to draw scrutiny as adoption grows.