\u201cWe\u2019re excited to partner with Truth Social to bring powerful AI to an audience with important questions. Curiosity is the engine of change, and Perplexity\u2019s AI is developed to empower curiosity by delivering direct, reliable answers with transparent citations that allow anyone to dig deeper,\u201d Perplexity\u2019s chief business officer Dmitry Shevelenko said in the press release.<\/p>\n
According to the announcement, \u201cthe mission of Trump Media is to end Big Tech\u2019s assault on free speech by opening up the Internet and giving people their voices back.\u201d Which is a funny thing to put in an announcement about Trump partnering with a company whose investors include Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and the former CEO of GitHub.<\/p>\n
Perplexity\u2019s Truth Social search engine will be powered by stolen content. Earlier this week, Cloudflare reported<\/a> Perplexity used stealth and undeclared crawlers to evade websites that explicitly set themselves up to avoid being catalogued by LLMs. Perplexity has a long history of using scrapers that ignore the Robots Exclusion Protocol<\/a>. Perplexity started as a demo that scraped Twitter<\/a> with fake academic accounts backed by AI-generated research proposals.<\/p>\n Forbes<\/a>, the New York Times, New York Post, and the Dow Jones have all accused Perplexity of plagiarism. News Corp\u2018s Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post sued Perplexity in 2024<\/a> for copyright infringement, claiming in the federal lawsuit that Perplexity is \u201cengaging in a massive amount of illegal copying of publishers\u2019 copyrighted works and diverting customers and critical revenues away from those copyright holders.\u201d\u00a0 In 2024, WIRED reported on the accusations of Perplexity\u2019s plagiarism<\/a> and Perplexity almost immediately plagiarized<\/a> the story. When New York Times tech workers went on strike last year, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas offered to help the Times<\/a> keep the paper going.<\/p>\n