Perplexity announces 'Computer,' an AI agent that assigns work to other AI agents
Source: Ars Technica
Overview
Given the right permissions and with the proper plugins, Perplexity’s new “Computer” could create, modify, or delete a user’s files and otherwise perform actions far beyond what most users could achieve with existing models and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Users can provide files such as USER.MD, MEMORY.MD, SOUL.MD, or HEARTBEAT.MD to give the tool context about its goals and how to work toward them independently, sometimes running for long stretches without direct user input.
On one hand, this enables impressive capabilities—the first glimpses of the knowledge work that AI boosters have predicted agentic AI would eventually perform. On the other hand, it is prone to serious errors and vulnerable to prompt injection and other security problems, partly due to a “Wild West” of unverified plugins.
The same toolkit that was used to create a viral Reddit clone populated by AI agents was also, at least in one case, responsible for deleting a user’s emails against her will.
Stay in your lane
Perplexity Computer aims to address those concerns in a few ways:
- Cloud‑based processing – The core process occurs in the cloud, not on the user’s local machine.
- Curated integrations – It lives within a walled garden with a vetted list of integrations, contrasting with OpenClaw’s unregulated frontier.
An imperfect analogy is that if OpenClaw were the open web of AI agent tools, then Computer is akin to Apple’s App Store: you’re more limited in what you can do, but you’re not trusting packages from unverified sources with access to your system.
Risks remain, however. LLMs can still make mistakes, which could be consequential if Computer works with data you haven’t backed up elsewhere or if you don’t verify its outputs.
Perplexity Computer seeks to “button up,” refine, and contain the wild power of the viral OpenClaw agentic AI tool—competing with the likes of Claude Cowork—by optimizing subtasks and selecting the models best suited to them.
It surely won’t be the last AI player to attempt this. After all, OpenAI hired OpenClaw’s developer, with CEO Sam Altman suggesting that some of what we saw in OpenClaw will be essential to the company’s product vision moving forward.