Earlier this week, WIRED published a story about the AI-powered search startup Perplexity, which Forbes has accused of plagiarism. In it, my colleague Dhruv Mehrotra and I reported that the company was surreptitiously scraping, using crawlers to visit and download parts of websites from which developers had tried to block it, in violation of its own publicly stated policy of honoring the Robots Exclusion Protocol. Our findings, as well as those of the developer Robb Knight, identified a specific IP address almost certainly linked to Perplexity and not listed in its public IP range, which we observed scraping test sites in apparent response to prompts given to the company's public-facing chatbot. According to server logs, that same IP visited properties belonging to Condé Nast, the media company that owns WIRED, at least 822 times in the past three months--likely a significant undercount, because the company retains only a small portion of its records. We also reported that the chatbot was bullshitting, in the technical sense.

Considering Perplexity's bold ambition and the investment it's taken from Jeff Bezos's family fund, NVIDIA, and famed investor Balaji Srinivasan, among others, it's surprisingly unclear what the AI search startup actually is. Earlier this year, speaking to WIRED, Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity's CEO, described his product--a chatbot that gives natural-language answers to prompts and can, the company says, access the internet in real time--as an "answer engine." A few weeks later, shortly before a funding round valuing the company at a billion dollars was announced, he told Forbes, "It's almost like Wikipedia and ChatGPT had a kid." More recently, after Forbes accused Perplexity of plagiarizing its content, Srinivas told the AP it was a mere "aggregator of information." The Perplexity chatbot itself is more specific.