Perplexity’s New AI Agent Runs on Your Own PC With Zero Token Costs

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Perplexity’s New AI Agent Runs on Your Own PC With Zero Token Costs

By Gizchina
Publication Date: 2026-08-26 09:46:00

Most AI agents still have one big problem: they live in the cloud. Your files are sent away for processing, and every serious task can eat into your usage limits. Perplexity thinks it has a better idea. Its new Portable Computer runs the AI agent on your own hardware, with no token costs for work done locally.

There is a catch, though. You are going to need a pretty serious PC.

The whole AI agent runs locally

Portable Computer is a local version of Perplexity Computer, the agent platform the company launched earlier this year. Instead of sending every task to a remote server, it puts the models, agent tools, inference engine and security sandbox on your own machine.

That means it can read PDFs, work with local files, run commands and handle longer tasks without uploading everything to the cloud. It can also connect to services such as Gmail, Google Drive, Slack and GitHub.

More importantly, local tasks don’t use cloud credits or generate token costs.

I can see the appeal here. If you use AI all day for work, paying for every token starts to matter. Keeping private files on your own computer is also a much better option for some tasks.

It can still ask the cloud for help

Running locally doesn’t mean Portable Computer is cut off from more powerful AI models. If the local model can’t handle part of a task, the agent can ask for permission to send that step to a cloud model. Perplexity says the user must approve the move first. The rest of the task can stay on the PC.

That’s probably…

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