Perplexity launches Portable Computer local AI agent

Perplexity has launched Portable Computer, a new version of its AI agent platform designed to run primarily on a user's own hardware, marking a significant shift toward local processing for complex, multi-step tasks. The announcement was made on August 25, 2026.

The new tool is a local-first iteration of Perplexity Computer, an agentic AI assistant that debuted in February 2026. While the original version relies on cloud-based processing, Portable Computer is built to execute its core runtime, including the orchestrator model, subagent models, and the agent harness, directly on the user's machine. This approach is intended to enhance privacy, speed, and cost-effectiveness by keeping sensitive data on-device and avoiding ongoing cloud inference fees.

At launch, Portable Computer is available only for Linux systems, specifically targeting NVIDIA's DGX Spark desktop supercomputer and other Linux machines equipped with NVIDIA RTX GPUs. Support for Windows systems with compatible NVIDIA RTX graphics cards is planned for September 2026. The software requires significant hardware resources, with an official recommendation of NVIDIA hardware with at least 32GB of VRAM to run the...