Perplexity Shipped Hybrid Compute, Handing the Confidential Half of a Running Task to a Local Mac Model Mid-Job

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Perplexity launched Hybrid Compute for its Computer agent on September 1, letting a single agent start a task on a cloud frontier model (Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol) and dynamically hand the sensitive portions of that same task to an open-weight model on the user's Apple silicon Mac without restarting or losing context. A built-in privacy classifier flags credentials, payment numbers and government IDs for local-only handling, and Perplexity open-sourced the PII classifier so enterprise IT can audit where the split falls. Local models supported are Gemma 4 E4B, Qwen 3.6, and a Perplexity post-trained Qwen 3.6; available to opted-in enterprise plus Pro and Max subscribers on macOS 15 or later.