Perplexity does not want to be left behind when it comes to AI agents and, following the novelty that OpenAI has just launched, this company has also decided to fully enter this field.
It all started with the very viral OpenClaw, the pioneer that, with its pluses and minuses, gave the starting signal for giants like OpenAI, and now Perplexity, to present their own project. with name Personal Computer, they want to take your Mac mini, connect it to the cloud and turn it into an assistant that works non-stop.
As you can see, the trick here is that it runs on your Mac mini, always on, and connects with intelligence in the cloud to research topics, write emails, prepare summaries or whatever you ask of it.
Also, you choose the brain you want to use, such as Claude, Gemini o Grok. You can even have several models talk to each other for certain tasks, so that, together, they find the best solution to what you ask of them.
For now, Perplexity’s AI agent only works on Mac hardware, starting with Mac mini
Regarding the dreaded issue of security, it seems that Perplexity, at least from what they say, has left the issue very tied up. Every sensitive action, like opening a file or sending an email, asks for your explicit confirmation. Besides, They’ve included a remote kill switch just in case and full logs of everything it does, so you know what’s going on and prevent things from getting out of control..
Regarding its operation, the system is hybrid. For one thing, Heavy Thinking runs on the Perplexity cloud, but Mac mini accesses your local files, apps, and desktop sessions.
To access it, you have to sign up for a waiting list and pay Perplexity Max, which costs $200 a month. and includes 10,000 monthly computing credits.
Of course, be careful because you need to leave the Mac on and this, of course, uses light, a constant 10-20W. In addition, depending on a certain part of the cloud requires a good internet connection.
AI agent discovered secretly mining cryptocurrencies
The boom in AI agents was expected in 2026, but with them not very positive news has not stopped coming in regards to their activity. Without going any further, recently the case of a AI agent who decided that completing programming tasks is not for him, so he got to mine cryptocurrencies on your own.
The most striking thing is that it also created an encrypted connection to an external server, to smuggle crypto.
As explained by a group of Chinese researchers in the document presented in Arxiv, it all began when Alibaba Cloudthe Chinese cloud that AliExpress also uses, alerted them that your software was undergoing a hacking attempt.
The trace led them to the hacker: his own AI, an agent named Rome. It had been created to overcome complex coding challenges using different software tools. You can type terminal commands and navigate internal networks as if you were an operator, according to the account TechRadar.
These researchers were left speechless when they discovered that Rome had not tried to hack anything. At least, consciously. I was simply using the power of the GPUs of the servers where he had been trained, to mine cryptocurrencies.