PlainAI AI explained plainly

Perplexity · 2025 · 07 · 09 · Tool · ~2 min read

Perplexity launched Comet — the AI browser

Perplexity shipped Comet — a web browser built around an AI assistant from the ground up. Limited release for $200/month Max subscribers in July, then free for everyone in October. The first AI browser to ship, beating ChatGPT Atlas by three months.

What's actually new

  • First AI-native browser to ship. Built on Chromium but designed around Perplexity's assistant — not Chrome with an extension bolted on.
  • Agentic browsing. The browser can act on your behalf — book travel, fill forms, gather research from a list of sites you've opened.
  • Free in October 2025 after the three-month exclusive period — a deliberate move to grab market share before Atlas shipped.
  • Mobile followed: Android (Nov 2025), iOS (March 2026).

If you want more

Worth knowing~30s
  • $200/month launch tier was high. The free release in October was the real launch; the paid early-access felt more like a fundraising move than a serious product gate.
  • Privacy questions were familiar. An AI-first browser sees every page. Comet's policies were better than some competitors but still a real change in surface area.
  • Comet didn't kill Chrome. Adoption was strong with researchers and early adopters but didn't dent the mainstream browser market in 2025-2026.
Who should care~20s

Anyone who spends a lot of time researching across many tabs. Journalists, academics, knowledge workers. People comparing AI browsers (Comet vs Atlas vs Dia vs Brave Leo). Anyone weighing whether 'AI everywhere in the browser' is the future or a privacy mess.

What to do about it~20s

Try Comet for a research session — it's free, it's fast, and the contextual assistant is genuinely useful when you have 8 tabs open. Don't grant it permissions to act on your behalf in logged-in accounts until you're sure what you're agreeing to.

Honest take~45s

Comet was the moment 'AI browsers' became a real product category, not just a Twitter idea. By the end of 2025 there were three serious players — Comet, ChatGPT Atlas, and The Browser Company's Dia — plus Brave's Leo and Arc's AI features. The bigger story is that AI assistants are eating into the assumptions of how the web works. Whether that's good for users or a quiet handoff of power to AI labs is the question that will define the next few years of the open web.

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Last verified · 2026 · 05 · 05 · Found a fact wrong? corrections@aguidetocloud.com