Perplexity Comet Assistant

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The Comet Assistant is the AI agent built into Comet, the Chromium-based web browser from Perplexity. It lives in a sidecar panel beside every web page, sees what the user is looking at, and can answer questions about the page, summarize it, compare it with other open tabs, and carry out web tasks such as filling out forms, comparing prices across sites, drafting emails, or building a shopping cart. Perplexity markets Comet as a browser that acts as a personal assistant, and the Comet Assistant is the part that does the work: instead of copying text into a separate chatbot, the user asks in place, and the assistant uses the page, the tabs, and, with permission, connected accounts as its context. Perplexity's own retrieval-grounded answer engine also replaces the usual list of search results, so cited answers appear directly in the browser.

Comet launched on July 9, 2025, for Windows and macOS, initially only for subscribers to Perplexity's $200-a-month Max plan and a waitlist. Perplexity made the browser and its sidecar assistant free worldwide on October 2, 2025, released an Android version on November 20, 2025, and brought Comet to the iPhone on March 18, 2026. On November 6, 2025, Perplexity shipped a rebuilt Comet Assistant that works across several tabs in parallel, takes on longer jobs, and asks permission before acting, and its internal tests showed the new version performing 23% better than its predecessor on multi-step tasks.

The assistant now operates in tiers. Free users get the sidecar and a mode for reading and interactive tasks that they watch and can interrupt, while paid Pro and Max subscribers can ask Comet to control the browser on their behalf, hand larger jobs to Perplexity Computer to run in the background, and use Background Assistants and an Email Assistant on the Max plan. Comet Enterprise, launched in March 2026, packages the same assistant with administrative controls, audit logs, and device-management deployment for companies.

The Comet Assistant differs from a chatbot because it acts inside the user's own logged-in browsing session rather than in a separate window, and it differs from cloud agents such as Perplexity Computer or Grok Bot because its default workspace is the browser on the user's own device. That design makes it convenient and fast for everyday web work, but it also exposes the assistant to everything it reads on the web, which is why prompt injection, permissions, and the legal status of agents acting on someone's behalf have shaped its development as much as any new feature. Understanding those trade-offs is the key to using it well, because the same access that makes it useful is what an attacker or a mistaken instruction would exploit.

The Comet Assistant turns the browser itself into the agent: instead of visiting the web and then asking an AI about it, you ask the web to do the work, inside your own tabs and logged-in accounts.

Mechanisms

The Mechanism

The assistant opens in a sidecar beside the current page with a keyboard shortcut (Alt+A on Windows, Option+A on Mac) or a toolbar button, and it can also be used by voice. By default its context is the page the user is viewing and any text they select. Users can pull in other open tabs by typing @ followed by a tab name, and they can explicitly share history or other material when a request needs it. Perplexity's March 2026 privacy documentation says the assistant does not, by default, upload the full browsing history, the full list of open tabs, cookies or site data, passwords and autofill data, local files, or text typed into websites, and that page, tab, or history context sent with a request can be retained for up to 30 days.

When the assistant acts on a page, the browser captures what is on screen and sends it to Perplexity's servers, which return navigation instructions that the browser carries out on the user's own device. This split mattered in court: in August 2026 the Ninth Circuit relied on it to conclude that the user, not Perplexity, is the one accessing a website when Comet shops on the user's behalf. Since the November 2025 rebuild, the assistant asks for approval before taking actions in the browser, such as clicking a button or entering data, and remembers the user's choice for the rest of that task. The work is organized into several levels of autonomy:

Search mode: the free default for answering questions, summarizing pages, PDFs, and videos, comparing tabs, and handling interactive tasks while the user watches and can step in
Control browser: a mode for Pro and Max subscribers in which Comet navigates the web on the user's behalf; Perplexity made Claude Opus 4.6 the default browser-agent model for Max subscribers when it introduced the mode
Work mode: a credit-metered option that hands a task to Perplexity Computer, which can spin up a browser agent inside Comet and reach logged-in sites with the user's permission, without connectors or MCP servers
Background Assistants: a Max feature, introduced in October 2025, that runs several assistants at once from a dashboard and can repeat tasks on recurring triggers
Email Assistant: a Max feature that drafts replies in the user's tone, organizes the inbox, and schedules meetings through connected Gmail and Google Calendar accounts

Several smaller features make the assistant easier to direct. Shortcuts save reusable prompts that can chain steps and reference tabs or files, Voice Mode (rebuilt on OpenAI's GPT Realtime 1.5) lets users ask about what is on screen and navigate by voice while switching tabs, and connections to Gmail and Calendar are strictly opt-in and revocable at any time. Because Comet is built on Chromium, it supports most Chrome extensions on the desktop, imports bookmarks and settings from Chrome, and accepts more than 500 Chromium management policies in enterprise deployments.

The Physics

An assistant that reads arbitrary web pages and acts with the user's own logins runs into hard limits of trust, reliability, and permission. Comet became one of the most studied examples of these limits because security researchers examined it closely in its first months. The main constraints are:

Indirect prompt injection: Brave's security team showed in August 2025 that instructions hidden in a Reddit comment could hijack the assistant when a user simply asked it to summarize the page, and in October 2025 it found that text invisible to people but readable in screenshots could do the same. LayerX's "CometJacking" research showed that a single crafted link could make the assistant pull data from connected services and send it out, and Guardio's "Scamlexity" tests tricked Comet into buying from a fake store and entering credentials on a phishing page.
Imperfect detection: Perplexity responded with layered defenses, including real-time classifiers that scan page content before the agent acts and its open BrowseSafe detection model. Perplexity reported a 91% detection rate on its own BrowseSafe-Bench benchmark, which still means roughly one attack in ten gets past the classifier, and detection dropped to 76% for multilingual attacks.
Reliability: Early hands-on testing found the agent helpful for simple tasks but prone to falling apart on complex ones, and independent reviewers have reported failure rates as high as a third on delegated multi-step jobs.
Platform permission: Websites can object to agents acting on users' behalf. Amazon sued Perplexity in November 2025 and won a preliminary injunction in March 2026 before the Ninth Circuit vacated it in August.
Identification: Interactive Comet sessions load pages as ordinary Chromium traffic from the user's own device and do not announce themselves the way Perplexity's declared crawlers do, which makes them hard for sites to recognize and is one reason some retailers have resisted them.
Capacity: Agentic use is metered. Perplexity publishes limits of 80 monthly browser-agent queries on Enterprise Pro and 800 on Enterprise Max, and consumer Work mode draws on Computer credits.

These constraints explain how careful users work with the assistant. From a cybersecurity standpoint, reading and summarizing tasks carry little risk, while anything that touches email, money, or accounts deserves narrow permissions, allow-once approvals, and close supervision. Security researcher Simon Willison argued after Brave's disclosure that trusted instructions and untrusted content still end up in the same stream of tokens for a large language model, so defenses reduce the risk of prompt injection without eliminating it, a view that Perplexity's own description of BrowseSafe as one layer among several reflects.

Why This Matters

The Comet Assistant is Perplexity's attempt to own the starting point of people's time online. CEO Aravind Srinivas has argued that becoming the default browser can deliver "infinite retention," and the assistant is what gives users a reason to switch from Chrome or Safari. Its significance reaches beyond one product:

A legal precedent for agents: The Ninth Circuit's August 4, 2026, ruling in Amazon's case held that the user, not Perplexity, accesses a site when Comet acts at the user's direction, and the court warned that an injunction would impair consumer choice and limit a nascent technology. Amazon's trademark and state-law claims continue, and the court called its holding narrow.
Open security research: Perplexity released BrowseSafe as an open-weight detection model along with BrowseSafe-Bench, a public benchmark of 14,719 examples that mimic production web pages, giving other agent builders a ready-made layer of protection.
Publisher economics: Comet Plus, announced in August 2025 at $5 a month and included in Pro and Max, promised participating publishers 80% of its revenue from an initial $42.5 million pool, paid for human visits, search citations, and agent actions.
Distribution beyond Comet: Perplexity turned what it learned building Comet into APIs that power Samsung's Browsing Assist, a conversational assistant built into Samsung Browser on Galaxy phones and Windows PCs.
A surviving standalone AI browser: OpenAI shut down its ChatGPT Atlas browser on August 9, 2026, after folding it into its desktop apps, leaving Comet as one of the few actively developed browsers built around an assistant from the start.
Enterprise adoption: Comet Enterprise added MDM deployment, telemetry and audit logs, CrowdStrike Falcon protection against phishing and malware, and a promise that enterprise data is not used for training, with early customers including Fortune, AWS, AlixPartners, and Bessemer Venture Partners.

The assistant competes with a growing set of personal agents, including Meta Muse, Grok Bot, OpenAI's dots, Google's Gemini Spark with Chrome auto browse, and Anthropic's Claude Cowork and Claude in Chrome. Most of those run in cloud computers that the vendor manages, while Comet keeps the user's own browser at the center, which gives it direct access to existing logins but also places it squarely on the front line of web security. Side-by-side reviews are collected in the Ready-to-Use AI Agent Comparison.

Building Blocks

Component	What It Does	Notes
Comet browser	A Chromium-based browser with Perplexity as the default answer engine, built-in ad blocking, and support for most Chrome extensions on desktop.	Available on Windows 10 and later, macOS Big Sur and later, Android 12 and later, and iOS 18 and later. The iOS version lacks extensions.
Assistant sidecar	A panel beside every page that reads the current page and selected text and answers or acts in place.	Opened with Alt+A (Windows) or Option+A (Mac); the @tab syntax brings other open tabs into a request.
Search mode	Free mode for questions, summaries of pages, PDFs, and videos, cross-tab comparisons, and supervised interactive tasks.	The user watches and can step in at any time.
Control browser	Lets Comet navigate and act on the web on the user's behalf.	Pro and Max; Max uses Claude Opus 4.6 as the default browser-agent model.
Work mode and Perplexity Computer	Hands longer jobs to Perplexity Computer, which can launch a browser agent inside Comet that reaches logged-in sites with permission.	Credit-metered; Max includes 10,000 credits a month. Since October 2026, Comet is the default browser for Computer's browsing.
Background Assistants	Run several tasks at once from a dashboard, including recurring tasks.	Max plan.
Email Assistant	Drafts replies in the user's tone, organizes the inbox, and schedules meetings through Gmail and Google Calendar.	Max plan; account connections are opt-in and revocable.
Shortcuts	Saved, reusable prompts that can combine steps and reference tabs or files.	Useful for routines such as daily briefings or recurring comparisons.
Voice Mode	Lets users ask about what is on screen, navigate by voice, and keep the conversation as they switch tabs.	Rebuilt on OpenAI's GPT Realtime 1.5.
Permissions and privacy controls	Asks before acting in the browser and remembers the choice for the task; users can block the assistant on specific sites and delete threads.	By default the assistant does not upload full history, tab lists, cookies, passwords, local files, or typed text.
Prompt injection defenses	Real-time classifiers and the open BrowseSafe model scan page content for hidden instructions before the agent acts.	BrowseSafe reports a 91% detection rate on Perplexity's own benchmark.
Comet Enterprise	Managed deployment with admin controls, telemetry, audit logs, 500+ Chromium policies, and CrowdStrike Falcon integration.	Launched March 2026; Enterprise Pro and Max include 80 and 800 monthly browser-agent queries.

Getting Started

Comet installs like any other browser, and the assistant is available as soon as it opens. The choices that matter most concern what the assistant may see and do, so it is worth setting permissions before handing it anything sensitive. The steps below follow Perplexity's setup guidance and independent walkthroughs:

Download Comet: Get the installer from Perplexity's Comet page for Windows or macOS, or install the app from Google Play or the App Store. Comet is free; basic browsing and some AI features work even without a Perplexity account.
Import your browser data: On first launch, import bookmarks, settings, and extensions from Chrome or another browser so Comet feels familiar.
Sign in: Sign in with a Perplexity account to sync across devices and use the assistant fully. A Pro or Max subscription unlocks Control browser, Work mode credits, and, on Max, Background Assistants and the Email Assistant.
Open the assistant: Press Alt+A (Windows) or Option+A (Mac), or tap the assistant button on mobile. Option+Shift+V starts Voice Mode on a Mac.
Start with the current page: Ask the assistant to summarize, explain, or extract information from the page you are reading, then use @ followed by a tab name to bring other tabs into the question.
Review privacy settings: Block the assistant on sensitive sites such as banking or health portals, and delete temporary threads when a task is finished.
Connect accounts only when needed: If you want help with email or scheduling, grant Gmail or Calendar access through the Perplexity connector. Access is opt-in and can be revoked at any time in settings.
Approve actions deliberately: When the assistant asks to click, type, or submit, choose to allow once until you trust a workflow, and watch the first few runs.
Hand off a first task: Describe the outcome, the sites to use, and any limits, such as a budget or dates. Comparison and research tasks are good starting points before anything that buys or sends.
Save repeat requests as Shortcuts: Turn prompts you use often, such as a morning briefing or a weekly price check, into Shortcuts.
Deploy for a team, if applicable: Administrators can roll out Comet Enterprise through existing MDM tools, apply existing Chrome policies by swapping the Chrome identifier for Comet's, and monitor usage through audit logs.

A few habits reduce risk considerably. Keep a human in the loop for purchases, sending email, and changing account settings, avoid giving the assistant access to everything at once, and be suspicious of pages, emails, or links from unknown sources while the assistant is active, since those are the usual vehicles for prompt injection. Treat the assistant's output as a draft to verify, especially for prices, dates, and anything it fills into a form.

Examples

Perplexity, reviewers, and early users have described a wide range of tasks for the Comet Assistant. The examples below are drawn from Perplexity's announcements, independent reviews, and published demonstrations rather than invented scenarios. Most fall into a few groups, and the safest and most reliable ones involve reading and organizing information, while tasks that act on accounts benefit from closer supervision.

Research and Reading

Summaries: Summarize a long article, a PDF, or a YouTube video without leaving the page, then ask follow-up questions or request an explanation of unfamiliar terms.
Cross-tab comparison: Build a table comparing products or services across open tabs, for example project tools such as Notion, Asana, Monday, and ClickUp on price for a team of ten, integrations, and user sentiment.
Deep research: Run Perplexity's Deep Research from the browser to gather information from many sources into a cited summary.
Job and market research: Search LinkedIn for specific job roles, or analyze competitors' listings and pricing in a market.

Shopping and Travel

Travel deals: Perplexity's own example asks Comet to search a few major sites for the cheapest flight from San Francisco to New York next Monday.
Price comparison: Compare prices and shipping speeds for the same product across several stores, and assemble a shopping cart for review.
Bookings: Research hotels or reservations and fill in booking forms, stopping for the user's approval before submitting.

Email, Calendar, and Daily Planning

Inbox help: Summarize unread email, draft replies in the user's tone, and organize the inbox with the Email Assistant.
Calendar briefings: Review the day's calendar, brief the user on each meeting and its attendees, and suggest when to leave and how to get there by public transit.
Scheduling: Find times and set up meetings through a connected calendar.

Work and Productivity

Data gathering: Collect details from several websites or online portals and compile them into an organized summary or a Google Sheet, such as an attendance or expense tracker.
Form filling: Complete repetitive web forms, such as a vendor security questionnaire, from information the user supplies.
Screening and review: Review applicants or proposals on a marketplace such as Upwork against criteria the user sets.
Enterprise analysis: At Atrium Hospitality, an AI manager described using Comet to pull context from separate hotel brand systems and draft analysis before a morning revenue call.

Sample Requests

The table below shows illustrative requests built from documented capabilities, with the mode each typically uses and where the user should expect to approve. Comet accepts ordinary language, so stating the goal, the sources, and the limits matters more than exact wording. Approval points reflect the assistant's practice of asking before it clicks, types, or submits on a site.

Request	Typical Mode	Where You Approve
"Summarize this article and list the three claims I should verify."	Search mode	No approval needed
"Compare the pricing pages in my open tabs and make a table for a team of ten."	Search mode with @tab	No approval needed
"Search a few major sites and find me the cheapest flight from San Francisco to New York next Monday."	Search mode or Control browser	Before entering traveler or payment details
"Collect the contact details from these five vendor portals into a Google Sheet."	Control browser or Work mode	Before signing in or writing to the sheet
"Draft replies to today's unread emails from clients and flag anything urgent."	Email Assistant	Before sending any reply
"Every Monday, check these three stores for the price of this monitor and tell me if it drops."	Background Assistant or Shortcut	Before buying

Known Limitations

Prompt injection remains unsolved: Despite classifiers and BrowseSafe, Perplexity's own figures imply that some malicious pages will slip past detection, and researchers continue to publish new attack variants against agentic browsers.
Inconsistent results on complex tasks: Reviewers report that the assistant handles simple tasks well but can stall, misread dates, or give up on long, multi-site jobs, so its work needs checking.
Data leaves the device: Page, tab, or history context the user sends with a request goes to Perplexity's servers and can be retained for up to 30 days, and agentic actions send screenshots of the page to Perplexity for processing.
Paywalls on autonomy: The free tier covers reading and supervised tasks, while Control browser, Work mode, Background Assistants, and the Email Assistant require Pro or Max, and agentic use is metered by credits or monthly query limits.
Site resistance and legal uncertainty: Amazon's lawsuit continues on trademark and state-law grounds even after the Ninth Circuit vacated the injunction, and other sites may block agents that do not identify themselves.
Publisher disputes: Perplexity faces several publisher lawsuits, including one alleging that the Comet browser circumvents a newspaper's paywall, which could affect what the assistant may read.
Platform gaps: The iOS version does not support extensions, and some features reach desktop and Android before iPhone.

History

Recent Developments

February 2025: Perplexity announced Comet without a release date.
July 9, 2025: Comet launched for Windows and macOS for Max subscribers and a waitlist, with the Comet Assistant in a sidecar.
July 25 to August 20, 2025: Brave reported an indirect prompt injection flaw to Perplexity, Perplexity shipped fixes, and Brave published its findings, noting that the issue was not fully mitigated.
August 25, 2025: Perplexity announced Comet Plus, a $5 monthly subscription sharing 80% of revenue with publishers from an initial $42.5 million pool.
August 2025: LayerX discovered the "CometJacking" technique, in which a crafted link could make the assistant exfiltrate data from connected services.
October 2, 2025: Comet became free worldwide, Background Assistants arrived for paid subscribers, and Comet Plus launched with publishers including The Washington Post, Le Monde, and Condé Nast. A Max-only Email Assistant had been announced days earlier.
October 21 to 22, 2025: Brave disclosed screenshot-based prompt injection in Comet, and Perplexity's security team published "Mitigating Prompt Injection in Comet."
November 2025: Amazon sued Perplexity over Comet's shopping on Amazon. On November 6, Perplexity released the rebuilt Comet Assistant with multi-tab work, longer tasks, a new permission flow, and a 23% improvement in internal tests, and on November 20 Comet launched on Android.
December 2, 2025: Perplexity released BrowseSafe, an open prompt-injection detection model, and the BrowseSafe-Bench benchmark.
February 25, 2026: Perplexity launched Perplexity Computer, its multi-model agent for long-running work, which later gained the ability to take control of Comet.
March 9, 2026: A federal district court granted Amazon a preliminary injunction against Comet's shopping agent; the Ninth Circuit stayed it pending appeal.
March 18, 2026: Comet launched on iPhone, completing its set of platforms, and Perplexity introduced Comet Enterprise.
August 4, 2026: The Ninth Circuit vacated the injunction, ruling that users rather than Perplexity access Amazon when Comet acts at their direction. Amazon petitioned for rehearing by the full court on August 18, and the appeals court rejected that bid the following month.
August 9, 2026: OpenAI shut down its ChatGPT Atlas browser, leaving Comet as a leading standalone AI browser.
October 5, 2026: Comet became the default browser for Perplexity Computer's browsing work, alongside new scheduled and conditional Automations in Computer.
October 2026: Comet for iOS added layouts optimized for the foldable iPhone Duo, and the desktop browser reached version 156.

Further Resources

Additional Viewing

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas on Comet, AI Browser Wars, and Why He's Not Selling to Big Tech is a CNBC interview in which Deirdre Bosa talks with Srinivas about the launch of Comet as a browser designed to go beyond chatbots and handle tasks. It explains the strategy described in the Introduction/Overview and Why This Matters sections, including why Perplexity built its own browser rather than an extension. Watch on YouTube

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas On Comet, Search, & The Future Of AI is a wide-ranging conversation with Semafor technology editor Reed Albergotti about the new Comet browser, search, and where AI assistants are headed. It complements the competitive and business discussion in Why This Matters, from distribution to the economics of answer engines. Watch on YouTube

Securing AI Agents: How to Prevent Hidden Prompt Injection Attacks is a technical explainer from IBM Technology on how agents that browse the web can be manipulated by instructions hidden in content and what defenses developers can apply. It gives general background for the prompt injection constraints in The Physics and the layered defenses described in the Building Blocks table. Watch on YouTube

39C3 - Agentic ProbLLMs: Exploiting AI Computer-Use and Coding Agents is a Chaos Communication Congress talk by security researcher Johann Rehberger, published by media.ccc.de in January 2026. It demonstrates end-to-end prompt injection exploits against computer-use and coding agents, including data exfiltration and command-and-control takeovers, and discusses vendor responses and mitigations, illustrating why the defenses in The Physics remain only partial. Watch on YouTube

References

The New Comet Assistant | Perplexity November 2025 announcement of the rebuilt assistant, its multi-tab work, new permission flow, and 23% improvement in internal tests.
Unseeable prompt injections in screenshots: more vulnerabilities in Comet and other AI browsers | Brave October 2025 follow-up research showing screenshot-based prompt injection and arguing that the problem is systemic across agentic browsers.
Comet browser faces multiple security vulnerabilities from prompt injection | PPC Land Timeline of the Brave, LayerX, and other disclosures in 2025 and Perplexity's response.
Agentic Browser Security: Indirect Prompt Injection in Perplexity Comet | Simon Willison Commentary on why prompt injection is hard to solve for agentic browsers.
Perplexity's BrowseSafe tries to patch the gaping security holes inherent in AI browser agents | The Decoder Analysis of BrowseSafe's 91% detection rate, its weaknesses on multilingual attacks, and its three-tier defense design.
Perplexity releases Comet browser globally at no cost after three-month limited rollout | PPC Land Coverage of the October 2, 2025, free release, Background Assistants, and Comet Plus.
Perplexity says it will give publishers 80% cut of new subscription product's revenue | Axios Report on the Comet Plus revenue-sharing model.
Perplexity Launches Comet AI Browser for iPhone With Built-In Assistant | MacRumors March 18, 2026, report on the iOS release and its feature set.
Perplexity launches Comet Enterprise with advanced security | TestingCatalog Details on Comet Enterprise deployment, browser policies, data handling, and compliance.
Perplexity APIs Power AI Browsing on Samsung Devices | Perplexity How technology built for Comet now powers Samsung Browser's Browsing Assist.
Perplexity has successfully overturned Amazon's injunction on its AI shopping bot | Engadget Coverage of the Ninth Circuit's August 2026 ruling and its reasoning.
Perplexity Just Won the Appeal Amazon's Court Order Was Waiting On | EcomCrew Explains the screenshot-and-instructions architecture the court relied on and Amazon's petition for rehearing.
Appeals Court Again Rejects Amazon Bid To Block Perplexity | MediaPost Report on the appeals court's rejection of Amazon's follow-up bid.
Perplexity Comet: What It Does, Costs, and Risks (2026) | GEO Toolbox Independent 2026 overview of Comet's modes, pricing, security history, and how its agent appears to websites.
How to Use Perplexity Comet in 2026 | Perplexity AI Magazine Practical guide summarizing Perplexity's documented privacy defaults, retention period, and enterprise usage limits.