TMTPOST -- Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Perplexity AI, In., appears to make an aggresive attempt to strengthen its AI-powered online search business.
Credit：SearchEngine Journal
Perplexity on Tuesday made an unsolicited $34.5 billion bid for Google’s Chrome browser, the most popular web browser in the world, the Wall Street Journal reported the same day. The company told the media outlet that several investors including large venture-capital funds had agreed to back the transaction in full.
Perplexity later Tuesday confirmed to CNBC about its $34.5 billion bid for Chrome. The offer was such a surprising one that it is significantly more than Perplexity’s own valuation. The developer of a free AI-powered answer engine in July was valued at $18 billion as part of an extension that valued the company at $14 billion months earlier.
In a letter to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and its parent Alphabet Inc., Perplexity said moving Chrome to an independent operator committed to user safety would benefit the public. It also told the Google boss that, as part of the proposed takeover, it would maintain and support Chromium, the open-source project that supports Chrome and other browsers. It also said that it would continue placing Google as the default search engine within Chrome, though users could change settings,per the Wall Street Journal.
Perplexity’s bid marks an "important commitment to the open web, user choice, and continuity for everyone who has chosen Chrome," a company’s spokesperson told BBC. The startup didn’t respond to queries about how the proposed acquisition would be funded.
Google didn’t comment on Perplexity’s bid. The tech giant has not announced any plan to sell Chrome.
The bid was deemed as an attempt to take advantage of uncertainty over a pending ruling of a Google’s antitrust case.
The U.S. government in 2020 filed its landmark case, alleging that Google controlled the general search market by creating strong barriers to entry and a feedback loop that sustained its dominance. A federal U.S. judge in August, 2024 ruled Google has illegally held a monopoly in its core market of internet search.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in November called for Google to divest Chrome, forcing the company to create a more equal playing field for search competitors. The divestiture will “permanently stop Google’s control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet”, the department said in a filling.
In response to the DOJ’s calling, Google said the department was pushing “a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology leadership,” and the “wildly overbroad proposal goes miles beyond the Court’s decision.”
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