MacRumors, on June 20:

Apple executives have been discussing the possibility of the company making a bid to acquire Perplexity AI, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Perplexity is one of the leading AI startups that has proven popular as an AI-infused web search engine.

From that Bloomberg report by Gurman:

Adrian Perica, the company’s head of mergers and acquisitions, has weighed the idea with services chief Eddy Cue and top AI decision-makers, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The discussions are at an early stage and may not lead to an offer, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private.

Such a deal would help Apple develop an AI-based search engine, part of efforts to cope with the potential loss of a longstanding arrangement with Google. That partnership, which involves making Google the default browser on devices, generates roughly $20 billion a year for Apple — and is now under threat from US antitrust enforcers.

To date, Apple executives haven’t discussed a bid with Perplexity management. Bloomberg News reported earlier Friday that Meta Platforms Inc. tried to buy Perplexity earlier this year.

“We have no knowledge of any current or future M&A discussions involving Perplexity,” the AI startup said in a statement. Apple declined to comment.

I think, reading between the lines of Apple’s prepared remarks and Tim Cook’s and CFO Kevan Parekh’s answers to analyst questions last week after announcing quarterly earnings, that it doesn’t sound like they believe Apple needs to make a big acquisition in this space. Apple could probably acquire Perplexity for a lot less than it would cost to acquire other companies in the space, but that’s partly because Perplexity doesn’t develop or train its own models. Perplexity primarily puts up its own front end atop models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Google, and xAI. I really don’t see what buying Perplexity would gain Apple.

But even putting that aside, it just seems like Perplexity is sketchy. This whole thing where Cloudflare seemingly caught them redhanded ignoring robots.txt directives and masquerading their user-agent makes the company seem like a poor cultural fit for Apple. I can see why Meta, a company without a moral compass, approached Perplexity to sniff around regarding an acquisition. That seems like a good cultural fit.

I can’t see why Apple would want to get involved with a company like this though. Gurman’s report makes it sound like his sources are inside Apple, but man, this “Apple + Perplexity” thing feels more like something Perplexity would be seeding than one that Apple executives would be leaking.

★ Tuesday, 5 August 2025