Perplexity has launched its bid to turn an AI assistant into a coworker. The company launched Teammates on November 5, 2026 — persistent AI agents that take ownership of ongoing work instead of waiting for prompts one session at a time. Access requires the company's 200-dollar-per-month Max plan, putting Perplexity directly against OpenAI and Anthropic in the race to build AI coworkers. Teammates run inside Perplexity Computer and use all of a user's tools and files there. According to the help centre, Teammates is a research preview open to individual Max subscribers on the web; Enterprise Pro and Enterprise Max accounts are not included by default. Native mobile and desktop apps are coming soon, with iOS specifically mentioned.
The distinction Perplexity is drawing is between an assistant you ask and an agent that owns. A Teammate does not wait for the next prompt — it holds an ongoing brief, works on it over time, and reports back. That is a different product from a chatbot, and it is the same direction the whole industry is moving: Anthropic merged Claude's chat and Cowork functions in September, and OpenAI merged ChatGPT's Chat and Work tabs on November 2.
The 200-dollar price point is deliberate. It positions Teammates as a professional tool, not a consumer feature, and it matches the top tier of OpenAI and Anthropic's own offerings. The bet is that people who do research for a living will pay for an agent that keeps working when they stop prompting. Whether that bet pays off depends on whether the agents are genuinely useful over days and weeks, not just impressive in a demo.
Teammates run inside Perplexity Computer, which means they operate with the user's tools and files rather than in a sandbox. That access is what makes persistent work possible: an agent that can read your documents, use your tools and keep state across sessions is an agent that can own a task. It is also what makes the security model critical — an always-on agent with file access needs guardrails that a one-shot chatbot does not.
The research-preview label is honest: this is early, individual subscribers only, and enterprise accounts are excluded by default. Perplexity is testing with its most committed users before selling to companies. The mobile and desktop apps, when they arrive, will matter — an always-on agent that only exists in a browser tab is only half always-on.
Persistent agents change the citation game. A chatbot cites sources for one answer; a Teammate working on an ongoing brief will return to sources repeatedly, track them over time, and build a working picture of which sites are reliable. The brands that become a Teammate's trusted sources will be cited again and again — not once, but as part of an ongoing workflow.
For content creators, that raises the value of being a durable reference. A page that is accurate, current and comprehensive is the kind an agent returns to; a page that is thin or stale gets dropped from the working set. The Teammates launch is early and expensive, but the pattern is clear: AI is moving from answering questions to doing jobs, and the sources it trusts for those jobs are the ones that will win the next era of visibility.
The research-preview label is worth taking seriously, because it signals that Perplexity knows this product is not finished. Persistent agents raise questions that one-shot chatbots never had to answer: what happens when an agent acts on stale information, or pursues a brief its owner has forgotten about, or files a report nobody reads. Those are product questions, but they are also trust questions, and the answers will determine whether Teammates becomes a daily tool or a curiosity. The 200-dollar price filters for users who will push the product hard and report what breaks — which is exactly the audience a research preview needs. The rest of the market should watch what those users discover, because the lessons will shape every persistent agent that follows, including the ones that will eventually be cheap.
Sources: Perplexity, November 5, 2026.
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