Perplexity Computer now runs fully local on Mac

Perplexity says its agent product, Perplexity Computer, can now run fully local on a Mac. What changes is where the work happens. Computer has been offered with hosted frontier models, such as Claude Opus 5.5 at its Standard effort level. The new post says both pieces of the system now stay on the machine: the model, which does the reasoning, and the agent, which carries out tasks by working with native Mac apps and local files. Perplexity says that lets tasks run without sending sensitive data to the cloud, and that the option is available now in the Perplexity Mac app.

Running on the user's own hardware is not new for Perplexity. It earlier said its Portable Computer could run the harness, agents and models locally on Windows PCs with Nvidia RTX GPUs, while still letting users call frontier cloud models when needed. The Mac post brings local running to the Perplexity Mac app.

The post does not say which model runs locally, what Mac hardware it needs, whether cloud models remain available as an option, or how its results compare with the cloud models Computer otherwise uses. Its attached video could not be transcribed for this note. The privacy point is Perplexity's description of the design, not an independent check.