The viral OpenClaw AI tool has already spawned dozens of imitators on GitHub and has spurred pivots from major AI players like Meta. Now Perplexity is throwing its hat into the personal AI agent arena, with a new tool that can put teams of sub-agents under your command.
Unveiled on Wednesday, Computer is being billed as a “general-purpose digital worker that operates the same interfaces you do”–or, as chief Perplexity business officer Dmitry Shevelenko calls it, a “massively multi-model orchestration system.”
Sounds like a lot of buzz words, 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 matter of weeks ago.
Work on Computer, which is currently available only to Perplexity Max users, began just last month as an “internal experiment,” Shevelenko wrote on LinkedIn. He attributed Computer’s speedy development to the fact that “work that would take weeks for a team was getting done overnight while we slept.”
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 crafting videos, Grok helping with “speed in lightweight tasks,” and ChatGPT 5.2 for “long-context recall and wide search.”
Like OpenClaw, Perplexity Computer can be set loose on a project–anything from building a web-based dashboard or an app to creating a PowerPoint deck or an animated GIF–and it will devise a plan and eventually deliver a finished product, delegating sub-agents to toil on specific tasks, such as finding API keys, coding, or conducting secondary research.
Unlike OpenClaw, Computer (which I’ve yet to try for myself) doesn’t live on your personal hardware. Instead, the Perplexity tool sits in the cloud and performs its work in a walled garden, interacting with outside services via a wide array of integrations. That’s a good thing if you’re worried about AI agents running amok on your system, but it also means Computer is bound by its sandbox, whereas OpenClaw can–if you let it–work directly on your devices.
Another key difference is that you communicate with Perplexity Computer via the Perplexity app, whereas OpenClaw and now Manus AI offer chat via commonly used social messaging apps like WhatsApp, Discord, and Telegram.
Perplexity’s Sheveleno noted that he and his team “originally talked to [Computer] via Slack, since it felt more like a digital worker than just an agent,” but eventually decided that it’s “more like a computer, [so] we decided to name it, rebuild it, and launch it as a public product.”