Apple executives held internal talks about buying Perplexity: Report

Apple executives have held internal talks about potentially bidding for artificial intelligence startup Perplexity, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

The discussions are at an early stage and may not lead to an offer, the report said, adding that the tech behemoth’s executives have not discussed a bid with Perplexity’s management.

Apple and Perplexity did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

Big tech companies are doubling down investments to enhance AI capabilities and support growing demand for AI-powered services to maintain competitive leadership in the rapidly evolving tech landscape.

Bloomberg News reported earlier on Friday that Meta Platforms tried to buy Perplexity earlier this year.

Meta announced a $14.8 billion investment in Scale AI last week and hired Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang to lead its new superintelligence unit.

Adrian Perica, Apple’s head of mergers and acquisitions, has weighed the idea with services chief Eddy Cue and top AI decision-makers, as per the report.

The iPhone maker reportedly plans to integrate AI-driven search capabilities- such as Perplexity AI- into its Safari browser, potentially moving away from its longstanding partnership with Alphabet’s Google.

Banning Google from paying companies to be the default search engine is among the remedies that the U.S. Justice Department has proposed to break up its dominance in online search.

While traditional search engines such as Google still dominate global market share, AI-powered search options including Perplexity and ChatGPT are rapidly gaining prominence this year and seeing rising user adoption, especially among younger generations.

Perplexity recently completed a funding round that valued it at $14 billion, according to the Bloomberg News report on Friday. A deal close to that value would be the largest acquisition for Apple till date.

The Nvidia-backed startup provides artificial intelligence search tools that deliver information summaries to users, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.