Perplexity AI

In August 2025, Cloudflare published research finding Perplexity used undeclared 'stealth' web crawlers to bypass robots.txt files and web application firewalls across tens of thousands of domains and millions of requests daily. When blocked, Perplexity would obscure its crawling identity to circumvent website preferences. Cloudflare de-listed Perplexity as a verified bot. Perplexity accused Cloudflare of 'incompetence and publicity-seeking.'

In August 2025, Perplexity was contracted to produce Truth Search AI, a chatbot for Donald Trump's Truth Social platform. Perplexity spokesman Jesse Dwyer stated: 'This is their choice for their audience, and we are committed to developer and consumer choice.' Ironically, the chatbot contradicted Trump by stating tariffs are a tax on Americans and that the 2020 election wasn't stolen.

Perplexity released pplx-kernels, a library of GPU communication kernels for mixture-of-experts (MoE) model inference, as open-source software under the permissive MIT license, publishing the code on GitHub with an accompanying engineering blog post. Perplexity states the library achieves substantially faster all-to-all communication than standard primitives and supports multiple hardware transports (NVLink, IBGDA, IBRC, AWS EFA). The repository has drawn outside contributors and underpins a published MLSys paper. This is part of a broader, ongoing pattern of Perplexity open-sourcing ML infrastructure under MIT licenses (also including pplx-garden and the pplx-embed embedding models with public technical reports), which is a genuine contribution to the open-source ML ecosystem distinct from the company's product/business controversies.

In October 2024, Dow Jones and New York Post filed a lawsuit against Perplexity alleging copyright infringement. News Corp CEO Robert Thomson stated Perplexity 'perpetrates an abuse of intellectual property that harms journalists.' Forbes had earlier publicly criticized Perplexity for publishing stories largely copied from their proprietary articles. Copyleaks analysis found one summary paraphrased 48% of a Forbes article, with 7% direct plagiarism.

Perplexity made what it described as its first philanthropic gift, giving $250,000 to Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism to fund Knight Lab research into how generative AI can support journalism workflows and improve news consumers' experience with AI-generated answers. The gift followed weeks after Forbes and Wired had publicly accused Perplexity of plagiarizing their reporting (June 2024) and came around the launch of Perplexity's first Publishers' Program revenue-share pilot (July 2024), so it should be read partly as a goodwill/relationship-building move toward the journalism industry during a period of active criticism, not a purely proactive initiative.