Perplexity says its Teammates, AI agents that keep working after you close your laptop, are now in the Mac app for Max subscribers.
According to TechRepublic, the Max plan costs $200 a month, or $2,000 a year. Perplexity excludes Pro and anyone on a cheaper tier.
Perplexity announced the Mac launch on X on 13 November, writing, “Teammates are now available in the Perplexity Mac app for Max subscribers.” Teammates first launched on the web last week. Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s chief executive, said on X on 5 November, “Native apps (mobile, desktop) coming soon.” Perplexity’s Help Center page still says teammates run on the Perplexity website and doesn’t mention the Mac app. Sources also disagree on whether an iOS version is live.
What a Teammate does
A Teammate is built for ongoing work, not one-off prompts. Digital Trends puts it this way: “Instead of guiding and hand-holding AI, you can assign tasks to your teammate agents, and they will do the work in the background.”
The examples include running a growth campaign, triaging bug reports as they land, keeping tabs on metrics, and digging into a new market. Teammates plan the tasks, add more agents if required, and notify you when a report is ready.
Perplexity’s Help Center adds detail. Each teammate has its own role, desktop, and browser, and it monitors connected tools such as Slack, GitHub, and Linear. It breaks a goal into tasks, runs the parallel ones across agents, and returns finished work for review, such as a report, a pull request, or a configuration change.
The work runs in Perplexity’s cloud, so nothing depends on your Mac staying awake, unlike local AI on a Mac, which relies on the machine’s own memory.
On security, the Help Center says teammates use your installed plugins with the same permissions and run on isolated computers. Saved credentials are encrypted, and teammates can’t view them. New teammates use Claude Opus 5.5 by default, and you can choose a different model for each one.
Credits, and who it’s for
Max includes a monthly credit allocation that teammates draw on. The Help Center warns that complex projects can use more, particularly when agents run in parallel, work with large files or codebases, or run frequent automations.
According to Perplexity’s product hub, every Max plan will include free usage for a promotional period. The company hasn’t said when the promotion ends.
The Help Center calls teammates a research preview on the web for individual Max subscribers, and warns that behaviour may change. It says the initial preview is “for individual Max subscriptions, not Pro,” and Enterprise Pro and Enterprise Max aren’t included by default. FourWeekMBA quotes Perplexity’s blog saying access and features will expand in the coming weeks, but Perplexity hasn’t given a date for Pro.
How it compares
Digital Trends names Meta Muse and ChatGPT Dots as similar agents, and Grok Bot as another that runs in the cloud without constant prompting. Tbreak has covered Grok Bot’s move to Anthropic’s Claude, and Claude Duet, Anthropic’s always-on agent, is US-only for now.
According to AI Chat Daily, OpenAI’s and Microsoft’s products target organisations, while Perplexity is selling Teammates to individual Max subscribers. Teammates also build on Perplexity Computer, which Tbreak reported could run fully offline on Mac, with a recommended 36GB of memory.
Srinivas has talked about a future in which organisations could have hundreds of AI teammates for each employee. TechRepublic calls that the company’s ambition, not a confirmed capability of the initial release. Perplexity hasn’t disclosed how many teammates one Max account can run.
