By Sharon Goldman
Publication Date: 2026-02-26 17:28:00
Welcome to Eye on AI, with AI reporter Sharon Goldman. In this edition: Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas talks to Fortune about the company’s new OpenClaw-like Computer…AI politics gets messy as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis leans into AI skepticism, seeking a contrast with Vance…Mistral AI lands Accenture as its latest big partner…AI complicates old internet privacy risks.
A few weeks ago, AI watchers began to notice something odd: Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, once among the most social-media-savvy executives in the AI world, had gone unusually quiet. The silence stood out at a moment when agent-style tools like Claude Code, Codex, and the viral open-source OpenClaw were dominating the conversation. Perplexity—long positioned as an AI-powered “answer engine” and a Google Search challenger—seemed conspicuously on the sidelines. Some even began to wonder whether the company had lost its way.
But Perplexity wasn’t lost, according to Srinivas—it was just busy building. I spoke with him yesterday, shortly after the company launched Computer, its attempt to turn today’s powerful but intimidating agent tools into something closer to a shared digital workspace that non-experts can actually use. The product is currently available only to Perplexity Max subscribers, with a broader rollout to Pro and Enterprise users planned in the coming weeks.
To my ear, Computer sounds like an OpenClaw for everyone else. Tools like OpenClaw often run on a…