Your files stay put: Perplexity’s hybrid AI keeps confidential data off the cloud

Perplexity today launched hybrid compute for its agentic platform, Computer , a system that lets a single AI agent split its work between frontier models running in the cloud and smaller open-weight models running locally on Apple silicon Macs — routing sensitive data to the local machine so it never leaves the device. The company says it is the first time an AI agent can begin a task in the cloud and dynamically hand off the confidential portions of that same task to a model running on the user's own hardware, without restarting the job or losing context. The feature becomes available to