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What's happening in robotics and AI — curated by the wujec.ai editors.
Perplexity's own model steps aside: the Sonar API becomes a shop selling OpenAI, Anthropic and Google
Perplexity's developer documentation now opens with a line that reads like a quiet change of business: "Sonar Chat Completions is now Agent API." The interface the company launched on 21 January 2025 to sell its own search-grounded model is being succeeded by one built around an agent loop — and around other companies' models. The Agent API is described as a unified interface for agent applications, with built-in tools the old endpoint never had: web search, URL fetching, code sandboxes, MCP servers, people search and finance search. Instead of a `messages` array with `choices`, a request produces a typed `output` array recording each step the agent took — reason, act, observe, continue, all inside a single call. The more interesting detail is the model list. Alongside Sonar, the Agent API brokers model families from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Z.AI, Moonshot AI and NVIDIA. A platform that existed to sell one proprietary answering model is now largely a way to buy everyone else's, with Perplexity's search stack as the wrapper. Sonar itself has not been switched off. The documentation says Sonar Chat Completions remains supported, while calling the Agent API more performant and cost-effective for production workloads — the standard phrasing of a migration that has not yet been given a deadline. Sonar Pro pricing is unchanged at 3 USD per million input tokens and 15 USD per million output, plus 6-14 USD per 1,000 requests depending on how much searching the answer required. The strategic reading is straightforward. Sonar's advantage was never raw reasoning; it was reading the live web and citing it, which is why it leads factuality benchmarks like SimpleQA while trailing frontier models elsewhere. Wrapping that retrieval layer around whichever model a developer prefers is a better use of the asset than asking them to accept Perplexity's model as well.
Perplexity Sonar Pro →US appeals court: an AI agent is a tool, not a trespasser
On 4 August 2026 the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated the injunction that had blocked Perplexity's Comet assistant from logging into Amazon accounts on a user's behalf, in Amazon.com Services LLC v. Perplexity AI (No. 26-1444). The lower court had granted that injunction on 9 March 2026. The reasoning matters more than the outcome. Amazon had argued that Perplexity gained unauthorised access to its servers under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — the 1986 anti-hacking statute. The appeals court disagreed on who was doing the accessing: the assistant is a tool, not a person for statutory purposes, and it is the user, logging in with their own credentials, who reaches Amazon's servers. The panel acknowledged there is "little to no existing caselaw directly dealing with how to ascribe responsibility for AI agents", let alone under the CFAA, and applied the rule of lenity — where a criminal statute is ambiguous, it is read narrowly. This is the first appellate answer to a question every agentic product now runs into: when software acts on your behalf inside your own account, is that you or the vendor knocking on the door. The answer here is "you". Amazon's trademark and state-law claims survive, so the dispute is not over, and a decision from one circuit does not settle the country — but automation vendors now have something to point at. wujec.ai does not yet have a profile for Perplexity or its Comet browser assistant; that gap is on our list.