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.

That figure deserves a pause. When Microsoft AI shipped the first model in this line just five months ago, it charged $0.36 an hour. Thursday's early-bird price cuts that by roughly 72%. For an enterprise processing 100,000 hours of call-center audio a year — a modest volume for a large bank or telecom — the bill drops from $36,000 to $10,000. At that level, transcription stops being a line item anyone argues about.

The launch, developed in close partnership with Nvidia, is one of the most aggressive attempts yet to move serious AI agent workloads off the cloud and onto local devices. The model, the user's files, and the work itself can all stay on the machine. Work completed locally consumes no billing credits, and the company says every task starts on the device by default — with the system asking permission before sending any individual step to a more powerful frontier model in the cloud.

The chip, which will power the next generation of IBM Z and LinuxONE systems, is the first dual-architecture mainframe processor ever built. It is designed to let enterprises run the vast and fast-growing ecosystem of Arm-native Linux software — including the AI frameworks that increasingly define modern infrastructure — directly alongside the z/OS transaction-processing workloads that anchor the world's banks, insurers, and governments.

Today is my last day as Editorial Director at VentureBeat.

Presented by Equinix

Today is my last day as Editorial Director at VentureBeat.