Perplexity Could Soon Enter AI Coding Race Against Claude Code And OpenAI

Perplexity is planning to go beyond AI search and enter the AI coding race. The firm is possibly working on a new AI coding tool that could compete with Claude Code and OpenAI Codex. According to a report published by Business Insider, the tool is currently being tested internally and carries a codename 'Teammate.' Furthermore, Perplexity engineers have been using the same since May 2026. In simple terms, Teammate has been designed to manage computer software projects. As per the internal announcement, cited by Business Insider, the tool can handle engineering work from scratch to finish. The announcement says, 'It’s built for long-horizon engineering work: owning projects, investigating issues, and monitoring services.'Apart from that, Engineers

at Perplexity have also been using the AI tool for tasks like finding bugs in the company's internal systems. Reports also suggest that the Teammate is model-agnostic, which means it is not connected to a single AI model or chatbot. Perplexity's Chief Technical Officer Denis Yarats has reportedly motivated engineers to rely more on the in-house AI while writing software. Just a few weeks ago, Yarats also shared messages with the team saying that by the end of the year, or maybe even sooner, software engineers should 'stop looking at code' and just use the AI.Perplexity has not announced anything officially related to Teammate or the plans for its public release. Nonetheless, if we get to see that tool, then it is directly going to compete with firms that already offer AI coding platforms. What's more is that Perplexity is also going to use NVIDIA's new central processing units (CPUs). NVIDIA said, 'Perplexity tested Vera on the agentic work it runs every day. Running a real coding workflow — cloning a repository and running its test suite in sandboxes — Vera completed the job about 1.5x faster than x86, and started concurrent sandboxes up to 1.9x faster. Perplexity is now looking to deploy Vera in its upcoming production system.'