Perplexity has taken its agentic Computer platform fully local with a release called Portable Computer. Everything ships as one system: the agent harness, the orchestrator, the planner, the tool router, and the post-trained models all run on the device. The target box is an NVIDIA DGX Spark, and local steps carry no per-token charge.
Two models ship at launch: Qwen 3.8 27B and PPLX 27B, Perplexity’s own post-trained variant, with NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning expected later. The whole setup sits behind an OS-level sandbox. Processes, filesystem paths, and network access are all confined to it. If the sandbox cannot start, tool execution is disabled rather than downgraded.
The setup is local-first but not local-only. When a step requires live web data or frontier reasoning, the orchestrator pauses and asks for approval, running a PII classifier over the context and showing users exactly what would leave the machine. Escalated steps go to one of 15+ cloud models, which receive only text guidance and no direct access to local files or tools.
Benchmarks on Perplexity’s own 53-task work bench put the Qwen-powered build at 82.6% and the PPLX variant at 85.4%. Terminal Bench 2.1 results tell a hybrid story: a fully local run scored 59.6% at near-zero marginal cost, escalation lifted that to 73% at about $0.415 per rollout, and Claude Opus 5 alone hit 82.4% at roughly $0.65.
Linux users on Pro, Max, and Enterprise plans get access first, with Windows support in September. The hardware bar is a GB10-class machine or an RTX GPU with 24GB of VRAM.
