Perplexity ships Comet and the agentic browser becomes a category
A Chromium-based browser with an answer engine and an agent that fills forms, books flights, and makes payments. The utility is real. The trust model is the part to watch.
On 9 July 2025, Perplexity launched Comet, an agentic browser built on the Chromium codebase with the company's answer-engine and an action-taking AI agent baked in. The browser shipped to Perplexity Max subscribers first at two hundred US dollars per month, with a wider rollout phased over the autumn. As reported by The Verge and Wired in coverage that week, Comet was the first commercially shipped product to fold the model, the browser, and the operating-system-level click-and-type capabilities of the Anthropic-style Computer Use into a single package.
The product demonstration showed the agent booking a flight from start to finish, including selecting a fare class, entering passenger details and processing payment, all inside the browser tab. The end-to-end task took roughly four minutes. The agent kept a visible audit trail of its decisions in a side panel, an interface choice that, for trust-and-control reasons, has since been adopted by competing products.
Why the browser was the right surface
The strategic argument, articulated by Perplexity chief executive Aravind Srinivas in a same-week interview with The Information, was that the browser was the only interface where an AI agent had pre-existing identity, payment credentials and session state already trusted by the user. Building agentic capabilities into a chat product required users to grant a long list of new permissions; building them into a browser inherited the permissions the user had already granted. The trust trade-off was, in this framing, made once at install rather than every session.
It put the agent inside the only interface where it was already partly trusted.
The category response was rapid. By December 2025, OpenAI, Anthropic and Brave had all announced or shipped agentic-browser products. The Chromium-fork-with-AI-agent design, with Comet as its first reference implementation, is now the dominant template. Whether the trust trade-off scales beyond early adopters remains the open product question.
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