Is Perplexity's new Computer a safer version of OpenClaw? How it works

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ZDNET’s key takeaways

• Perplexity debuted Computer on Wednesday morning.
• It’s positioned essentially as a safer alternative to OpenClaw.
• It harnesses over a dozen leading AI models.

There’s been a lot of excitement (and nervousness) lately about AI agents that can work autonomously in the background of a user’s computer, accessing sensitive files, API keys and the like to perform various tasks. Some say they’re a monumental productivity unlock, others say they’re a security nightmare. Perplexity is betting they’re the future of AI.

On Wednesday, the company introduced Computer, a multiagent orchestration system that harnesses the strongest capabilities from more than a dozen frontier AI models. Currently available only to Perplexity Max users — and expected to roll out to Enterprise and Pro subscribers in the coming weeks — “Computer is a general-purpose digital worker,” the company wrote in a press release, that “reasons, delegates, searches, builds, remembers, codes, and delivers.”

Multiagent orchestration

The logic behind Computer is basically that, rather than becoming general-purpose tools, as they’re commonly described, AI models have instead branched off into different specialties: Anthropic’s Claude, for example, is famously popular among software engineers. Relying on a single model to complete a complex task — building a website, say — is therefore a bit like trying to assemble an…