The way Perplexity AI Inc. frames it, the company is something of a freedom fighter for the open web. Its “answer engine” — don’t call it a chatbot — is democratizing access to information just as Google once did. And its Comet web browser, which can carry out some tasks on a user’s behalf, is a revolutionary time-saving tool.
But among some of its tech peers, Perplexity is becoming company non grata. Last week, Amazon.com Inc. sued the company to stop allowing Comet’s autonomous AI agent from browsing Amazon’s store on a customer’s behalf. A week earlier, Reddit Inc. alleged Perplexity, in concert with three data companies, was illegally circumventing controls to prevent the scraping of billions of posts on the huge message board so they could be cited in Perplexity’s answers. The chief executive officer of cybersecurity company Cloudflare Inc. said Perplexity was behaving “more like North Korean hackers” than a legitimate AI company.