Perplexity Computer goes fully local on Mac — the local turn reaches macOS
From the AI digest for 2026-10-20
What happened: On October 20 (~12:34 PM ET), Perplexity CEO Arav Srinivas announced: "You can now run Perplexity Computer fully local on your Mac with no cloud based inference, without WiFi too," with the product account adding that "the model and the agent both run on your Mac," that Computer "can work with your native Mac apps and local files, and run tasks without sending sensitive data to the cloud," and that it is "available now in the Perplexity Mac app."
What's genuinely new: This is a development, not a debut — it continues the local-inference turn in Perplexity's agent-infrastructure thread, which opened on September 14 with the NVIDIA partnership and "Portable Computer" on Windows RTX PCs. The new step is the platform extension to macOS. The "available now" status is the vendor's own claim; the window carries no independent check of it. On the AI beat, the announced/shipped distinction stays explicit: the on-device framing is Perplexity's description of its own rollout.
Watch: Which Mac hardware actually runs the full model-agent stack; whether local mode still leans on the Search API backend for retrieval; and whether the privacy framing ("without sending sensitive data to the cloud") gets third-party verification.
Links: Arav Srinivas on X