Perplexity AI

Perplexity Sonar API is a developer-focused API for generating AI responses grounded in web search results. It sits in the research and developer tooling space rather than as a standalone chat app, and the docs position it for cases where you want built-in web search, streaming responses, and access to Sonar models.

You get started by creating an API key in the Perplexity API portal and calling the API from Python, TypeScript, cURL, or OpenAI-compatible client libraries. Per the docs, it works with Perplexity’s native SDKs as well as OpenAI-style chat completions, which lowers the setup cost if you already have existing client code.

This is a hosted API, not a local or self-hosted agent stack. The main strength is straightforward access to web-grounded responses through a familiar API shape; the main limitation is that it is still an API endpoint, so you need to build your own app logic, guardrails, and downstream workflows around it.

The page does not provide pricing details, model architecture details, or privacy specifics beyond the surrounding docs navigation. It also does not describe autonomous task execution; Sonar is better understood as a retrieval-backed response API than a fully autonomous agent. If you need structured outputs or third-party models, the docs point you to Perplexity’s Agent API instead.