@ai-sdk/perplexity 5.0.0: breaking migrate from Sonar Chat Completions to Perplexity Agent API

Core Background & Industry Pain Points

Apps on the Vercel AI SDK Perplexity provider were wired to Sonar Chat Completions—model IDs, provider options, stream events, and usage fields. Perplexity’s Agent API (presets, tools, richer retrieval/tool traces) is now the capability center; the old path cannot represent native traces such as finance, and PDF/multimodal semantics diverge, so upgrades concentrate into one breaking migration.

Architecture Highlights & Internals

@ai-sdk/perplexity@5.0.0 (2026-09-26) moves language generation to the Agent API: replace Sonar model IDs/options with presets, models, and tools; reshape response metadata, raw stream events, and usage/cost. Implementation tracks each message content part, recovers missing text from terminal events/output items (including incomplete) without repeating deltas, dedupes URL citations while keeping search-result IDs, and accepts native tool traces without web-search validation.

Authoritative Benchmarks & Measured Scores

No public latency/accuracy numbers in the release notes—this is a protocol-level breaking upgrade. Versus 4.x Sonar: capability expands to Agent API presets/tools while Sonar PDF input and image/video results are dropped; callers must rewrite observability and billing against the new metadata/stream shapes.

Developer Hands-on Guide

Install @ai-sdk/perplexity@5.0.0, follow the provider docs to remap Sonar IDs/options to Agent API presets/models/tools, replace any PDF/multimodal assumptions, and update usage/cost plus citation correlation (URL + search-result ID). Release: GitHub; package: npm.