Perplexity's new Computer is another bet that users need many AI models

Perplexity has made a new agentic tool available to subscribers this week. The tool, called Perplexity Computer, unifies every current AI capability into a single system according to the company. It serves as a computer user agent that can execute complex workflows independently using 19 different AI models and create subagents for specific problems. The tool is offered exclusively on the 200 dollar per month Perplexity Max subscription tier. It runs entirely in the cloud. Example workflows include collecting statistics, financial or legal data, creating analysis and sharing findings as finished websites or visualizations. Perplexity executives outlined the product during a background briefing with the press last week. The scheduled demonstration was canceled because flaws were found in the product hours before the event. Executives argued that multi model is the future because models are specializing. The company has found that users switch between models for different queries. Visual outputs are most often sent to Gemini Flash, software engineering to Claude Sonnet 4.5 and medical research to GPT 5.1. Perplexity offers a feature called Model Council that lets users query multiple models at once. The company plans to release the Comet browser on iOS next month and hold a developers conference called Ask on March 11 in San Francisco.