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Perplexity is quietly building an AI coding tool to take on Cursor and Claude Code
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Jul 7, 2026, 7:22 PM ET
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Perplexity could be the latest entrant to the red-hot AI coding wars.
The San Francisco-based AI search startup has built an internal AI coding tool that it may launch publicly later down the line, a person familiar with the matter said.
For now, Perplexity has codenamed the tool "Teammate," and its engineers have been using it since May, according to screenshots obtained by Business Insider.
It's unclear exactly if or when Perplexity, which was valued at $20 billion in a funding round last year, will launch the product. If it does, it would put Perplexity — originally focused on an AI-powered search engine that competes with Google — much closer to vying for supremacy with Cursor, Anthropic, and OpenAI, all of which have built widely-used AI coding products.
Teammate is meant to oversee softwareprojects from start to finish, according to an internal announcement seen by Business Insider.
"It's built for long-horizon engineering work: owning projects, investigating issues, and monitoring services," the announcement reads.
A Perplexity spokesperson declined to comment.
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Perplexity engineers have given the tool tasks such as finding bugs in internal systems, screenshots show.
The AI tool is model-agnostic, meaning that it's not built on any particular chatbot, the person familiar with the matter said.
Perplexity's chief technology officer, Denis Yarats, has also urged the startup's engineers to use AI for coding.
A few weeks before Teammate launched internally, the executive wrote in messages viewed by Business Insider that by the end of the year or sooner, software engineers should "stop looking at code" and just use AI.
Yarats also defended AI against accusations that it produces "slop," or poor-quality code.
"Slop is not going to be a thing" as long as the code it generates passes quality checks, Yarats wrote.
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Charles Rollet is BI's tech correspondent in San Francisco. Prior to joining BI, Charles worked at TechCrunch covering startups and VC. Charles is based in the Bay Area, where he enjoys hiking with his dogs. You can contact Charles securely on Signal at charlesrollet.12 or +1-628-282-2811.
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