Perplexity makes "ask before the cloud" a feature, and prices it at DGX Spark

The escalation prompt is the product. Everything beneath it, the inference engine, the agent harness, the sandbox, the app connectors, is assembly work a competent team could do itself and normally has to ^[8][7]. What a team cannot easily build is the moment where the agent halts, says this step exceeds the local model, and waits to be told yes or no ^[2][6]. That is a governance artifact dressed as a UX detail.

The billing design is the part worth reading twice. Locally completed work consumes no credits, and only the portion sent to the cloud counts toward cloud usage ^[10]. Run that backwards and the invoice becomes a meter: credits accrued are a rough measure of how much of a month's agent work left the box. For an auditor asking where the data went, a line item beats a policy statement.

The awkwardness is in the pairing. Computer was pitched in February as an always-on agent that keeps working whether or not you are at the keyboard, with the processing in the cloud ^[14]. Portable Computer's privacy claim depends on a human being present to approve handoffs ^[6]. Neither account says what happens to an unattended overnight run that hits a step the 27B local model cannot handle: it either stalls or the approval degrades into a reflex click. That distinction decides whether this is a compliance control or a dialog box.

The GPU is also not the perimeter. Portable Computer reads local files and PDFs, runs shell commands and searches the web, and connects to Google Drive, Gmail, Slack and GitHub ^[3]. Gizmodo, citing VentureBeat, describes a demo in which it posted data analysis into a Slack channel on the user's behalf ^[17]. Data leaves through sanctioned integrations with no frontier model involved and no escalation prompt to approve. Tom's Guide, which credits Perplexity's claim that code and tool use stay inside the local sandbox, said it wanted more detail on exactly what that sandbox can reach and how the permissions are controlled ^[9]. That is the first question any security review asks, and it is currently unanswered.

Then the bill. Gizmodo puts a Mac Mini with an M4 at about $900 and a DGX Spark at roughly five times that ^[15], which is about $4,500 ^[19], one-time rather than metered ^[18]. Add a Pro, Max, Enterprise Pro or Enterprise Max subscription ^[13] and a 24GB VRAM floor that clears most desks out of the running ^[11]. Meanwhile the menu narrows: Computer launched offering 19 models, Portable launches with two ^[16], seventeen fewer ^[20]. Pay more, choose less, and in return know which steps ran where. For a regulated team that has been told no to every agent pilot, that trade may be the only one on offer.