Dylan Patel: 45% of SemiAnalysis AI Spend Now Goes to Persistent Agents
Persistent Agents are the next unlock of AI usage Our spend on AI is now 45% persistent agents Unfortunately for Anthropic, Claude Tags sucks OpenAI's Slack agent is even worse We primarily use Perplexity Computer, which uses a lot of different models Perplexity's Harness mogs
Context
It is a concrete data point from a heavy AI user that always on agents are becoming the main way companies spend on AI.
Dylan Patel runs SemiAnalysis, a research firm that covers chips and AI infrastructure. Persistent agents are AI agents that keep running and working over long periods instead of answering one prompt. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas responded to the post.
Deep dive
Dylan Patel posted that persistent agents are the next unlock of AI usage, and that his firm's spending on AI is now 45% persistent agents.
He gave blunt reviews of several products. He wrote that Claude Tags from Anthropic is bad and that OpenAI's Slack agent is even worse. He said his team primarily uses Perplexity Computer, which he noted uses many different models, and praised Perplexity's agent harness.
These are the opinions of one heavy user, not a benchmark, and Patel did not share how he measured spending or which tasks the agents handle. The 45% figure covers his own firm's AI budget only.
Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity, quoted the post and said the name Perplexity Computer came from a Patel blog post that described coding agents as a new kind of computer.
The post lands as AI labs and startups compete to sell agents that stay on and work inside company tools, from Slack to browsers, rather than chat windows that wait for a prompt.
What to expect next
Watch for Anthropic and OpenAI to respond with updates to their workplace agents, and for more companies to share what share of their AI budget goes to agents. If persistent agents keep taking a larger share of spending, the race among labs will shift further toward harnesses, tool use and reliability over long runs, not just raw model scores. Perplexity is likely to use the post in its own marketing.