Perplexity AI is finally bringing Comet browser to Android: here’s who gets access first

​Perplexity AI has begun sending invites for its Comet browser on Android. The San Francisco-based startup had begun sending out invites for Windows and Mac users earlier this year and later made it generally available.

​Perplexity founder Aravind Srinivas shared the news of Comet browser for Android invites being sent out to a few early testers. Users can go to the Google Play Store or the Comet browser website to register their interest for the AI-powered browser. Srinivas said that Perplexity’s paying customers and regular users of the AI-backed search engine would get preference for the invites.

​“Comet Android early invites are going out. If you want to maximize your chances for early access and shaping how the future of mobile browsing looks like—it all comes down to your Perplexity Android usage and Pro/Max user status! More invites will go out soon,” wrote Srinivas in a post on X.

​Perplexity mounts challenge to Chrome’s dominance:

​Just like in the PC market, Google Chrome has continued to reign supreme in the Android browser market as well. As per SimilarWeb data, Chrome holds a 60.45% market share in the mobile browser market, followed by Safari at 31.22%, Samsung Internet at 4.98%, Opera at 1.13%, and Firefox at 0.38%.

​However, Perplexity has been looking to dethrone Google’s dominance in most of the company’s core segments using the power of AI. The company already offers an AI-powered search assistant that competes directly with Google Search. Meanwhile, with Comet browser, Perplexity is aiming to use the power of AI to tempt users into switching over from Chrome.

​For the unversed, Comet is an agentic AI browser that can perform a plethora of tasks on behalf of the user, like summarize content, book meetings, send emails, and automate multi-step workflows like comparing products, filling out forms, booking hotels, and more.

​Problems with agentic AI browsers:

​While Perplexity has been busy touting the benefits of AI browsers, researchers from rival browser Brave have gone on to show a systematic security flaw with agentic AI browsers. The researchers in multiple blog posts showed that these AI browsers are prone to prompt injection attacks where hackers could hide commands in invisible text on a webpage that could be interpreted by the AI agent as a legitimate command by the user, leading it to perform unintended actions like sending emails, accessing a user’s bank account, or other sensitive details.

​Perplexity’s own security team acknowledged the severity of the issue in a blog post last month and said that the problem “won’t be solved through conventional adversarial testing (red teams). It demands rethinking security from the ground up.”