Perplexity’s new device deploys groups of AI brokers

The viral OpenClaw AI device has already spawned dozens of imitators on GitHub and has spurred pivots from main AI gamers like Meta. Now Perplexity is throwing its hat into the private AI agent enviornment, with a brand new device that may put groups of sub-agents below your command.

Unveiled on Wednesday, Laptop is being billed as a “general-purpose digital employee that operates the identical interfaces you do”–or, as chief Perplexity enterprise officer Dmitry Shevelenko calls it, a “massively multi-model orchestration system.”

Seems like lots of buzz phrases, however the backside line is that Perplexity Laptop is one more agentic AI device that may really exit and do issues. That places it in the identical class as Meta’s Manus AI and–after all–OpenClaw, the open-source AI device that kicked off the latest “private AI agent” craze only a matter of weeks in the past.

Work on Laptop, which is at present obtainable solely to Perplexity Max customers, started simply final month as an “inner experiment,” Shevelenko wrote on LinkedIn. He attributed Laptop’s speedy improvement to the truth that “work that might take weeks for a crew was getting finished in a single day whereas we slept.”

Laptop is powered by a wide range of totally different AI fashions, with Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 working the “core reasoning engine,” Gemini dealing with deep analysis initiatives, Nano Banana creating pictures, Veo 3.1 crafting movies, Grok serving to with “pace in light-weight duties,” and ChatGPT 5.2 for “long-context recall and broad search.”

Like OpenClaw, Perplexity Laptop may be set unfastened on a challenge–something from constructing a web-based dashboard or an app to making a PowerPoint deck or an animated GIF–and it’ll devise a plan and finally ship a completed product, delegating sub-agents to toil on particular duties, corresponding to discovering API keys, coding, or conducting secondary analysis.

Not like OpenClaw, Laptop (which I’ve but to strive for myself) doesn’t reside in your private {hardware}. As an alternative, the Perplexity device sits within the cloud and performs its work in a walled backyard, interacting with outdoors providers through a wide selection of integrations. That’s an excellent factor if you happen to’re frightened about AI brokers working amok in your system, nevertheless it additionally means Laptop is certain by its sandbox, whereas OpenClaw can–if you happen to let it–work immediately in your gadgets.

One other key distinction is that you just talk with Perplexity Laptop through the Perplexity app, whereas OpenClaw and now Manus AI provide chat through generally used social messaging apps like WhatsApp, Discord, and Telegram. 

Perplexity’s Sheveleno famous that he and his crew “initially talked to [Computer] through Slack, because it felt extra like a digital employee than simply an agent,” however finally determined that it’s “extra like a pc, [so] we determined to call it, rebuild it, and launch it as a public product.”