Perplexity launches fully local AI agent mode for Mac

Perplexity has introduced a fully local mode for its Perplexity Computer AI agent on Mac, allowing the model, task planning, reasoning, and file processing to occur entirely on-device. This update enables users to perform complex workflows—such as analyzing emails, managing Notes, or drafting documents in Numbers and Excel—without sensitive data being transmitted to the cloud.

The local mode utilizes either the Qwen 3.6 open-source model or PPLX Pro, a version of Qwen specifically fine-tuned by Perplexity for computer operations. To ensure security, all code and tool executions are performed within isolated sandboxes. While the mode can function offline, users can still authorize cloud access for tasks requiring real-time web browsing or access to more than 15 frontier models for advanced reasoning.

This feature is available to Pro, Max, and Enterprise subscribers. Due to the high computational demands of running these models and the task coordinator locally, Perplexity recommends Apple Silicon Macs with at least 36GB of unified memory. For users with less memory, the company continues to offer a Hybrid Compute mode, which splits tasks between local processing and cloud-based models.