Perplexity to Launch 'Comet' AI Browser on iOS
Perplexity is launching its AI-native browser, Comet, on iOS next month, offering a conversational and context-aware web navigation experience. The company also tightened its terms of service, explicitly banning automated use of its platform by bots and scrapers for both free and paid accounts. The moves signal a push to define the AI-native user experience while protecting its business model from programmatic exploitation.
- The upcoming iOS version of Comet is scheduled for release on March 11th for iPhones running iOS 18 or later. - Perplexity was founded in San Francisco in 2022 by engineers from top AI labs including OpenAI, Google Brain, Meta, and DeepMind. The founding team includes CEO Aravind Srinivas, a graduate of IIT Madras and UC Berkeley. - The company has seen rapid growth in valuation, reaching a reported $20 billion after its latest funding round in September 2025. Key investors include Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Databricks. - Comet is built on Chromium and integrates Perplexity's own AI models as well as external LLMs like GPT-5 and Claude 4 to provide conversational control and task execution directly within the browser. - Beyond search, Comet functions as an "agent" that can perform multi-step tasks like summarizing articles, scheduling meetings, and comparison shopping across different tabs. - The browser features a "co-pilot" assistant that can be controlled via text, voice commands, or contextual cues like "@tabs" to interact with open web pages. - While the Comet browser will be a free download, Perplexity will offer "Pro" and "Max" subscription tiers, ranging from $4.99 to $200, for access to more advanced AI models and features. - CEO Aravind Srinivas has positioned Perplexity as a direct competitor to Google, aiming to create an "answer engine" that provides synthesized, cited answers instead of a list of links.
