Perplexity’s new tool deploys teams of AI agents
The viral OpenClaw AI tool has already spawned dozens of imitators on GitHub and spurred change from major AI players like Meta. Now, Perplexity is throwing its hat into the AI personal agent arena, with a new tool that can put teams of sub-agents under your command.
Unveiled Wednesday, Computer is billed as a “general-purpose digital worker that leverages the same interfaces as you” — or, as Perplexity’s chief business officer Dmitry Shevelenko calls it, a “massively multi-model orchestration system.”
This sounds like a lot of buzzwords, but the bottom line is that Perplexity Computer is yet another agentic AI tool that can actually go out and do things. That puts it in the same category as Meta’s Manus AI and, of course, OpenClaw, the open source AI tool that kicked off the recent “personal AI agent” craze just a few weeks ago.
Work on Computer, which is currently only available to Perplexity Max users, began last month as an “internal experiment,” Shevelenko wrote on LinkedIn. He attributed Computer’s rapid development to the fact that “work that would take a team weeks was being done overnight while we slept.”
The computer is powered by a variety of different AI models, with Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 running the “core reasoning engine”, Gemini handling deep research projects, Nano Banana creating images, Veo 3.1 creating videos, Grok helping with “speed in light tasks”, and ChatGPT 5.2 for “long context recall and broad search”.
Like OpenClaw, Perplexity Computer can be started on a project – from building a web dashboard or app to creating a PowerPoint deck or animated GIF – and it will develop a plan and ultimately deliver a finished product, delegating sub-agents to work on specific tasks, such as finding API keys, coding, or conducting secondary research.
Unlike OpenClaw, Computer (which I haven’t tried yet) doesn’t live on your personal hardware. Instead, the Perplexity tool sits in the cloud and does its work in a walled garden, interacting with external services through a wide range of integrations. That’s a good thing if you’re worried about AI agents being unleashed on your system, but it also means the computer is limited by its sandbox, whereas OpenClaw can, if you let it, run directly on your devices.
Another key difference is that you communicate with Perplexity Computer through the Perplexity app, while OpenClaw and now Manus AI offer chat through commonly used social messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Discord, and Telegram.
Perplexity’s Sheveleno noted that he and his team “initially spoke to [Computer] via Slack, because it seemed more like a digital worker than just an agent”, but ultimately decided it was “more like a computer, [so] we decided to name it, rebuild it and launch it as a public product.
