About
Perplexity AI, Inc., or simply Perplexity, is an American privately held software company offering a web search engine that processes user queries and synthesizes responses. Perplexity products use large language models and include web search capabilities which provide responses based on current Internet content, citing sources used. A free public version is available, while a paid Pro subscription offers access to more advanced language models and additional features.
Perplexity AI, Inc., was founded in 22 August 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. As of September 2025, the company was valued at US$20 billion.
Perplexity AI has faced legal scrutiny over allegations of copyright infringement, unauthorized use of content, and trademark issues from several major media organizations, including the BBC, Dow Jones, and The New York Times. According to separate analyses by Wired and, later, Cloudflare, Perplexity uses undisclosed web crawlers with spoofed user-agent strings to scrape the content of websites that prohibit or explicitly block web scraping.
From Wikipedia’s article on Aravind Srinivas, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2
Companies
- Perplexity AIFounder14
Early life and education
Career
Occupation: computer scientist, entrepreneur, artificial intelligence researcher.7
- Date not recordedFounded Perplexity AI6
Personal life
Legal issues and controversies
Copyright and trademark infringement allegations
In June 2024, Forbes publicly criticized Perplexity for using their content. According to Forbes, Perplexity published a story largely copied from a proprietary Forbes article without mentioning or prominently citing Forbes. In response, Srinivas said that the feature had some "rough edges" and accepted feedback but maintained that Perplexity only "aggregates" rather than plagiarizes information.
In October 2024, The New York Times sent a cease-and-desist notice to Perplexity demanding that it stop accessing and using NYT content, claiming that Perplexity is violating its copyright by scraping data from its website. In June 2024, Dow Jones and New York Post filed a lawsuit against Perplexity, alleging copyright infringement. The lawsuit also alleged that Perplexity harmed their brand by attributing hallucinated quotes, for example, on F-16 jets for Ukraine, to articles that did not include them. On October 24, 2024, Perplexity AI published an official response on its company blog asserting that the claims in the lawsuits were misleading and stating it was open to revenue-sharing arrangements with content providers. On January 31, 2025, Perplexity was sued in the United States for alleged trademark infringement by Perplexity Solved Solutions (PSS), a software firm founded in 2017. The lawsuit claims that Perplexity AI's use of the name "Perplexity" violates PSS's federally registered trademark and could cause consumer confusion. PSS had previously declined an offer from Perplexity AI to purchase the trademark in 2023. The suit seeks to prevent Perplexity AI from using the name in its branding and marketing. In June 2025, UK broadcaster the BBC threatened legal action against Perplexity AI, demanding that the company stop the unauthorized scraping of its content, delete all retained BBC material used in training its models, and provide financial compensation for the infringement of its intellectual property rights. On August 8, 2025, the Japanese newspaper company Yomiuri Shimbun filed a lawsuit against Perplexity for "free-riding" use of 120,000 articles of the publication from February to June 2025. Later that month, two more Japanese newspaper companies, The Asahi Shimbun and The Nikkei, also sued the company for alleged copyright infringement.
In October 2025, Reddit sued Perplexity in federal court in New York, alleging that it and three other companies unlawfully scraped its data.
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Stealth web crawlers
In June 2024, separate investigations by the magazine Wired and web developer Robb Knight found that Perplexity does not respect the Robot Exclusion Protocol (or robots.txt) standard, which may include requests for web crawlers to not scrape sections of the site's content, despite Perplexity claiming the opposite. While Perplexity publicly lists the IP address ranges and user agent strings of its web crawlers, Wired and Robb Knight claim that it uses undisclosed IP addresses and spoofed user agent strings when ignoring robots.txt. In response, Srinivas stated that Perplexity was not ignoring robots.txt, but suggested that it relied on third-party web crawlers that do. When asked, Srinivas declined to commit to cease scraping Wired content using third parties.
In August 2025, Cloudflare published research revealing that Perplexity was using undeclared "stealth" web crawlers to bypass web application firewalls intended to block Perplexity crawlers, and did not respect robots.txt files. Among others, Cloudflare's CEO Matthew Prince tweeted that Perplexity acts "more like North Korean hackers" than a reputable AI company. Perplexity publicly denied the claims, labeling them as a "charlatan publicity stunt."
From Wikipedia’s article on Aravind Srinivas (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.
Links
Sources
The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.
- 1WikidataAravind Srinivas on Wikidata
- 2WikipediaAravind Srinivas on Wikipedia
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- 4Wikidataeducation, as reported
- 5Wikidataeducation, as reported
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- 8
- 9Wikidataplace of birth, as reported
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- 11Wikidatacitizenship, as reported
- 12WikidataAravind Srinivas: X, on Wikidata
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- 14WikidataPerplexity AI, Founder
- 15Wikimedia CommonsAravind Srinivas photo by TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0