The investigation into Perplexity's practices follows a report accusing the startup of stealing an article and further evidence of scraping abuse and plagiarism. Perplexity's AI-powered search chatbot has been linked to these activities. The company has been found to access servers using an unpublished IP address, which has been detected on the servers of the Guardian, Forbes, and The New York Times. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas claims the IP address is operated by a third-party company, which he refused to name. Despite the investigation, Perplexity has made no changes to its operation, claiming that its bot respects the robots.txt protocol.
Key takeaways:
- Amazon's cloud division has launched an investigation into Perplexity AI, a startup backed by the Jeff Bezos family fund and Nvidia, over allegations of violating Amazon Web Services rules by scraping websites that attempted to prevent it.
- Perplexity AI is accused of ignoring the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a web standard that indicates which pages should not be accessed by automated bots and crawlers, and of plagiarizing content from other websites.
- Perplexity's CEO, Aravind Srinivas, claims the IP address involved in the alleged scraping is operated by a third-party company, which he refused to name due to a nondisclosure agreement.
- Despite the investigation, Perplexity has made no changes to its operations and maintains that its services do not violate AWS Terms of Service. However, it admits that its bot will ignore robots.txt when a user enters a specific URL.