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Perplexity offers to buy Chrome for billions more than it’s raised

In a moonshot move, AI search engine Perplexity has offered to buy Chrome from Google for $34.5 billion cash in an unsolicited offer, Reuters reported and Perplexity has confirmed to TechCrunch. Perplexity tells TC the terms of the offer include a commitment to keep Chrome’s underlying engine, Chromium, open source and continue to invest in it. Perplexity’s offer includes a promise to invest $3 billion into the open source project. Perplexity is also promising not to change the user defaults o

Perplexity offers to buy Google's Chrome browser for $34.5 billion

Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI has made an unsolicited $34.5 billion bid for Google's Chrome browser, CNBC confirmed on Tuesday. That figure is higher than Perplexity's current valuation, but the company said several investors have agreed to back the deal. In July, Perplexity was valued at $18 billion as part of an extension that valued the company at $14 billion months earlier. Google did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment. The Wall Street Journal was first t

Perplexity Wants to Buy Google Chrome for $34.5 Billion: Report

AI company Perplexity has offered to buy Google’s Chrome browser for $34.5 billion, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. The offer is being characterized as a “longshot,” especially since Perplexity itself is only valued at about $18 billion, according to the newspaper, but the idea is rooted in a very real problem for Google: A judge is currently considering whether Google’s parent company Alphabet should be forced to sell Chrome over antitrust concerns. Perplexity told the

Perplexity offers to buy Google Chrome for $34.5 billion

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. The startup also offered to buy TikTok earlier this year. Google hasn’t indicated that it would sell Chrome at any price, and so far, the court hasn’t ordered a sale. Perplexity spokesperson Jesse Dwyer confirmed to The Verge that the WSJ’s reporting is accurat

Designing Software in the Large

Designing Software in the Large Software75 Jul 22, 2025 – Filed as: A Philosophy of Software Design is my favorite book I’ve read to date about designing large long-lived maintainable software programs. Here’s what I learned: Complexity Complexity is anything related to the structure of a software system that makes it hard to understand & modify the system. Symptoms of complexity: Change Amplification - A seemingly simple change requires code modifications in many different places. High Cog

Truth Social’s New AI Chatbot Is Donald Trump’s Media Diet Incarnate

When I ask the new Truth Social AI chatbot about navigating bias in the media ecosystem, it gives what I view as pretty reasonable advice. “Diversify your sources,” it responds. “Rely on news outlets across the political spectrum, including those from both left-leaning and right-leaning perspectives.” This is advice that the AI itself may not be taking to heart. For instance, to come to the above answer it cites five sources, four of which are Fox News articles. The fifth, inexplicably, is a 4

Truth Social's New AI Chatbot Is Donald Trump's Media Diet Incarnate

When I ask the new Truth Social AI chatbot about navigating bias in the media ecosystem, it gives what I view as pretty reasonable advice. “Diversify your sources,” it responds. “Rely on news outlets across the political spectrum, including those from both left-leaning and right-leaning perspectives.” This is advice that the AI itself may not be taking to heart. For instance, to come to the above answer it cites five sources, four of which are Fox News articles. The fifth, inexplicably, is a 4

The War for the Web Has Begun

A high-stakes war has just broken out over the future of the internet. In one corner is Cloudflare, a giant of web infrastructure that acts as a gatekeeper for a huge portion of online traffic. In the other is Perplexity, a darling of the AI world, a search engine threatening to upend Google’s dominance. The accusation is explosive: Cloudflare claims Perplexity is a bad actor, a rogue bot that ignores the internet’s oldest rules to secretly scrape data from websites that have explicitly told it

What founders need to know before choosing their exit — straight from Jai Das and Roseanne Wincek — at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

Startups face more exit options — and more uncertainty — than ever before. That’s why we’re bringing this essential conversation to the Going Public Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, happening October 27–29 in San Francisco’s Moscone West. Whether you’re already eyeing a liquidity event or just starting to scale, this is your chance to hear what top VCs are looking for and how to set your company up for long-term success. Two of the best in the business — Roseanne Wincek of Renegade Partners an

I used Perplexity to make a restaurant reservation - now I'm wondering if Google is holding us back

Tang Ming Tung/Getty Images ZDNET's takeaways Perplexity's new feature lets you make a restaurant reservation straight through OpenTable. The feature uses OpenTable's system, so you don't have to trust the AI to do it for you. Instead of navigating between apps or tabs to find a restaurant and then book a table, Perplexity handles everything. Finding the perfect restaurant and making a reservation just got a whole lot easier thanks to a new feature in Perplexity. The chatbot (which ZDNET's

Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big

Here’s an interesting take on Germany’s exit tax, which I have written about before: Leave Germany before your business gets big. What do I mean by that? I mean that once you’re a business owner in Germany and your business has reached a certain size, you are essentially barred from ever moving out of the country again. Crazy, right? I think it’s also pretty crazy that no one really talks about this. This is, quite literally, erecting a “Berlin Wall” around German entrepreneurs, forcing them

Trump's Truth Social launches AI search powered by Perplexity

Truth Social, President Trump's social media platform, is beta testing an AI search feature powered by Perplexity . Truth Search AI is launching first on the web version of Truth Social, with plans to begin a public beta for the feature on iOS and Android in the near future. "We're excited to partner with Truth Social to bring powerful AI to an audience with important questions," said Dmitry Shevelenko, chief business officer at Perplexity. The controversial AI company has found itself embroile

Truth Social’s AI search is powered by Perplexity, but the platform can set limits on sources

AI startup Perplexity is powering a new AI-powered search engine on Truth Social, President Donald Trump’s social media platform. The search engine, dubbed Truth Search AI, is already available on the web version of Truth Social, with public Beta testing on its iOS and Android apps planned for “the near future.” Trump Media said in a press release that Perplexity’s tech provides “direct, contextually accurate answers with transparent citations” which will help Truth Social “exponentially incre

Trump Media Is Testing an AI Search Engine Powered by Perplexity

President Donald Trump's media company, Trump Media, is beta-testing a new AI search feature, Truth Search AI, on the Truth Social platform. The Florida-based company announced the news on Wednesday in a press release. Trump Media and Technology Group is perhaps best known for its social-media program Truth Social. The company is separate from the New York-based Trump Organization. "We're proud to partner with Perplexity to launch our public Beta testing of Truth Social AI, which will make Tru

I tried Perplexity's new reservation feature, and it surprised me with new dining spots to try

Thomas Barwick/Getty Images ZDNET's takeaways Perplexity's new feature lets you make a restaurant reservation straight through OpenTable. The feature uses OpenTable's system, so you don't have to trust the AI to do it for you. Instead of navigating between apps or tabs to find a restaurant and then book a table, Perplexity handles everything. Finding the perfect restaurant and making a reservation just got a whole lot easier thanks to a new feature in Perplexity. The chatbot (which ZDNET's

Perplexity says Cloudflare's accusations of 'stealth' AI scraping are based on embarrassing errors

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET ZDNET's key takeaways Cloudflare claims Perplexity ignores websites' wishes in its content hunt. Other AI companies, such as OpenAI, don't wipe content, Cloudflare says Cloudflare now offers services to block aggressive AI crawlers. Perplexity is denying Cloudflare's claims. Cloudflare, a leading content delivery network (CDN) company, has accused the AI startup Perplexity of evading websites' "no crawl" directives by stealthily deploying web crawlers to scrape

Some people are defending Perplexity after Cloudflare ‘named and shamed’ it

When Cloudflare accused AI search engine Perplexity of stealthily scraping websites on Monday, while ignoring a site’s specific methods to block it, this wasn’t a clear-cut case of an AI web crawler gone wild. Many people came to Perplexity’s defense. They argued that Perplexity accessing sites in defiance of the website owner’s wishes, while controversial, is acceptable. And this is a controversy that will certainly grow as AI agents flood the internet: Should an agent accessing a website on b

Perplexity is sneaking onto websites to scrape blocked content, says Cloudflare

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET ZDNET's key takeaways Cloudflare claimed Perplexity ignores websites' wishes in its content hunt. Cloudflare said other AI companies, such as OpenAI, don't wipe content. Cloudflare now offers services to block aggressive AI crawlers. Cloudflare, a leading content delivery network (CDN) company, has accused the AI startup Perplexity of evading websites' "no crawl" directives by stealthily deploying web crawlers to scrape content from sites that have explicitly bl

Perplexity gives Apple new reason not to acquire the AI company

Perplexity has long been accused of deliberately bypassing anti-scraping measures to retrieve web content. While the company has historically dismissed these accusations as disingenuous or misunderstandings, a new report shows that not only is the practice still happening, but it may actually be getting worse. Perplexity’s main counter-argument: semantics The issue with Perplexity’s web crawling practices first came to light in June 2024, when Wired and other media outlets accused the company

Perplexity is allegedly scraping websites it's not supposed to, again

Web crawlers deployed by Perplexity to scrape websites are allegedly skirting restrictions, according to a new report from Cloudflare. Specifically, the report claims that the company's bots appear to be "stealth crawling" sites by disguising their identity to get around robots.txt files and firewalls. Robots.txt is a simple file websites host that lets web crawlers know if they can scrape a websites' content or not. Perplexity's official web crawling bots are "PerplexityBot" and "Perplexity-Us

AI site Perplexity uses “stealth tactics” to flout no-crawl edicts, Cloudflare says

AI search engine Perplexity is using stealth bots and other tactics to evade websites’ no-crawl directives, an allegation that if true violates Internet norms that have been in place for more than three decades, network security and optimization service Cloudflare said Monday. In a blog post, Cloudflare researchers said the company received complaints from customers who had disallowed Perplexity scraping bots by implementing settings in their sites’ robots.txt files and through Web application

Cloudflare says Perplexity’s AI bots are ‘stealth crawling’ blocked sites

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. The AI search startup Perplexity is allegedly skirting restrictions meant to stop its AI web crawlers from accessing certain websites, according to a report from Cloudflare. In the report, Cloudflare claims that when Perplexity encounters a block, the startup wi

Perplexity accused of scraping websites that explicitly blocked AI scraping

AI startup Perplexity is crawling and scraping content from websites that have explicitly indicated they don’t want to be scraped, according to internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare. On Monday, Cloudflare published research saying it observed the AI startup ignore blocks and hide its crawling and scraping activities. The network infrastructure giant accused Perplexity of obscuring its identity when trying to scrape web pages “in an attempt to circumvent the website’s preferences,” Cloudfl

Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade no-crawl directives

5 min read We are observing stealth crawling behavior from Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine. Although Perplexity initially crawls from their declared user agent, when they are presented with a network block, they appear to obscure their crawling identity in an attempt to circumvent the website’s preferences. We see continued evidence that Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing their source ASNs to hide their crawling activity, as well as ignoring — or sometimes

Perplexity for Mac now supports MCP, and you should check it out

The Perplexity app for macOS lets you trigger a keyboard shortcut to instantly bring up the prompt field for a search. And now, it’s getting even more useful thanks to the addition of MCP support. Here’s what that means, and why you should look into it. What’s MCP again? MCP, or Model Context Protocol, was proposed by Anthropic and is quickly becoming the industry’s standard interface between AI systems and traditional platforms. In a nutshell, it wants to be the AI equivalent of what HTTP is

Samsung has its eye on Perplexity and OpenAI as it plans to expand beyond Gemini

Ryan Haines / Android Authority TL;DR Samsung is reportedly looking to expand its AI offerings. The company is said to be in talks with multiple vendors, including OpenAI and Perplexity. The aim is to give Galaxy S26 users more choice over what AI model they use. Samsung has long been partnering with Google to bring Gemini to its Galaxy phones. While this partnership has served Samsung well, a new report suggests the company doesn’t want to be tied to only one outside AI model. The firm is s

Perplexity’s Comet is the AI browser Google wants

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. Perplexity has just launched its agentic answer to Google Chrome — it’s called Comet, and it knocked out a slate of tasks on my behalf, though I think I could’ve done some faster myself. The new AI-powered browser is currently only available to Perplexity Max subscribers or through an early access waitlist, and it’s supposed to simplify the way you

Perplexity sees India as a shortcut in its race against OpenAI

While OpenAI has cemented its lead in the U.S., Perplexity is taking a different route — quietly expanding into India to compete in the next phase of AI adoption. The search-focused AI startup is rapidly adding millions of users in the world’s second-largest internet and smartphone market, positioning itself for mass-market scale. This week, Perplexity partnered with Bharti Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator after Reliance Jio, to offer a free 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription —

5 reasons why I still prefer Perplexity over every other AI chatbot

Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images I've been working with artificial intelligence (AI) since the 1970s, when Lisp was state-of-the-art. Lately, like everyone else, I've been looking at AI a lot more closely. While it's nifty and getting genuinely useful, it can still blunder, like the time Google's AI Overviews recommended users to eat "at least one small rock per day." AI can also lose its mind, such as when Grok went totally MechnaHitler. Even when I tell J. Random Chatbot to summari