Perplexity Introduces PII-TRACE Benchmark and PII-Tracer On-Device Detector

Perplexity on September 1, 2026, introduced PII-TRACE, a benchmark for evaluating detectors of personally identifiable information, and PII-Tracer, a compact 0.6B-parameter model built to flag PII on a user's device before text is sent to cloud models. The announcement frames both releases as privacy infrastructure for the company's hybrid compute architecture, in which cloud agents handle research, reasoning, and planning while a local model works with private files. Under that architecture, a…