Overview

• Apple has held early internal discussions about acquiring Perplexity AI but has not made a formal offer.
• Perplexity’s valuation reached about $14 billion after its latest funding round, and it processed 780 million queries in May.
• Apple executives intend to integrate Perplexity’s conversational search technology into Safari or Siri to accelerate its delayed AI initiatives.
• The acquisition would provide Apple with an alternative search engine if antitrust rulings upend its multibillion-dollar Google agreement.
• Perplexity is confronting legal threats from several news organizations over allegations of unauthorized content scraping and attribution issues.