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 today through Perplexity's desktop app for enterprise customers that opt in, as well as Pro and Max subscribers, on any Apple silicon Mac running macOS 15 or later.

"Hybrid is really compelling because it's often the work that requires confidentiality that is the most important to get right, and so the accuracy really, really matters," Jon Staff, who leads Perplexity's macOS and iOS engineering teams, said during a press briefing attended by VentureBeat. "By combining these two together, we can get that maximum intelligence from the frontier models, but we also get the security and the privacy that comes with local."

How Perplexity's on-device privacy gate keeps sensitive data off the cloud

The architecture works like a dispatcher. A frontier model in the cloud breaks a task into subtasks and routes each one to the appropriate place. Web research, long-horizon planning and heavy reasoning run in the cloud, while anything touching private files, local data or actions on the device gets delegated down to a subagent running on the Mac itself.

The linchpin is what Perplexity calls a Privacy Gate: a company-trained classifier that runs on the device and scans for personally identifiable information — names, addresses, account numbers, secrets — before anything is transmitted to the cloud. When the gate flags sensitive content, the user chooses whether that portion of the task runs locally or gets shared.

"What we wanted to do is make sure anything that's shared to that cloud orchestrator is safe," Staff said. "We built and trained our own PII classifier that integrates directly into the Mac app."

He described the handoff in detail: "The cloud orchestration will break down the task based on the prompt and figure out how to route it to different ...