Perplexity Is Internally Testing Its Own Claude Code Rival

Perplexity is building its own coding agent. A tool called Teammate has been under internal testing since May, with engineers already using it to hunt down bugs in the company's internal systems. Perplexity has not officially confirmed the project exists, but details leaked to the press via Business Insider.

Teammate is meant for long-horizon engineering work, the kind that doesn't wrap up after a single prompt and response. According to descriptions cited by the press, the tool is built to run entire projects, investigate reported issues, and monitor live services. That sets it apart from typical coding assistants, which generate code snippets on request rather than carrying a project forward over weeks.

What we actually know

Business Insider's reporting indicates Perplexity engineers have been using Teammate for several months for tasks like catching bugs in the company's internal infrastructure. The tool has not launched publicly, and the company has released no information on a release date, pricing, or the models it runs on. A key feature is its independence from any single model provider: Teammate is designed to route requests to different engines depending on the task, rather than being locked to one model like Claude or GPT.

Perplexity, known mainly for its AI-powered search engine, has been expanding into developer tools for some time. The company previously unveiled Perplexity Comet and has been experimenting with agentic features in its browser. Teammate would be a natural extension of that strategy into a segment currently dominated by Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI.

The fight for developers

The market for autonomous coding assistants is growing at a pace that would have seemed unrealistic just a year ago. Anthropic's Claude Code has become the benchmark for the entire category, and rivals, from Cursor to OpenAI's tools, keep racing to add features that let agents work independently on larger chunks of code without a developer supervising every step. Perplexity's entry into this segment would signal that the company wants to compete not just for search users, but for an entirely different corporate customer base: engineering teams paying for developer tool subscriptions.

The context behind comments from Perplexity CTO Denis Yarats also matters. He has reportedly been pushing the company's engineers to rely more and more on AI when writing code, arguing that by later this year, or possibly sooner, developers should stop looking at the code itself and simply use AI. That is a radical stance for the chief technology officer of a company that itself employs hundreds of engineers, and a sign that internal testing of Teammate is already shaping how the team works.

No matter what sequence of prompts we started with, we managed to get engineers to rely on AI instead of looking at the code itself - Denis Yarats, CTO of Perplexity

What it means for developers

For companies currently using Claude Code or OpenAI's tools, the arrival of another strong competitor could mean lower prices and faster feature development, competition in this segment has historically sped up the pace of updates. Teammate's model-agnostic approach, if it reaches the market, would give customers the flexibility to switch engines without rewriting an entire integration, an argument that could appeal especially to larger engineering teams wary of vendor lock-in.

For now, though, everything is happening behind closed doors. Perplexity has confirmed neither the tool's full capabilities nor a planned public launch date. The fact that the company has been testing it since May and is already using it for real production tasks suggests the project is further along than a mere internal experiment.

Sources: Perplexity Develops 'Teammate' AI Coding Assistant (letsdatascience.com), Perplexity working on an AI coding tool to compete with Claude Code: Report (digit.in)