The offer comes as the US Department of Justice is pushing for Google to divest from Chrome.
AI search engine Perplexity has made an unsolicited $34.5bn offer to purchase Google’s Chrome browser despite being valued at $18bn.
The terms of Perplexity’s proposed deal include a promise to keep Chrome’s engine Chromium open source and make an additional investment of $3bn into the project.
Perplexity also promises to leave Google as the default search engine in Chrome, rather than replace it with its own AI-powered option.
The offer comes as the US Department of Justice (DOJ) pushed for Google to divest from Chrome this April after last year’s ruling, in which a US court determined that the Alphabet-owned company is a search monopolist.
However, Google seems to want to keep Chrome, which could be valued at “upwards of $50bn” according to competitors with around 3.45bn users worldwide. The company’s lawyers, earlier this year, called the DOJ’s anti-trust remedies against Chrome “extreme” and “fundamentally flawed”.
Although, the bigger question here is whether Perplexity can actually purchase Chrome. According to some publications, the company has said that several investors are interested in backing this deal. Plus, this isn’t the first time Perplexity has offered to buy the browser. The company made a similar offer alongside OpenAI earlier this year during Google’s anti-trust hearing.
But some suggest that the move is a “PR offer” and a “marketing stunt”, comparing the proposal to Perplexity’s offer to purchase TikTok earlier this January just before the short-form video sharing app was due to be banned from the US.
The company’s offer to purchase TikTok US, which it submitted to its parent company ByteDance, was to create a new merged entity by combining the two companies along with new capital partners. Nothing has come out of that proposal yet.
Regardless of the outcome of this latest offer, Perplexity poses a threat to established browsers such as Chrome. Last month, the company released Comet, an AI-powered browser, which is already in strong demand, according to its co-founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas. The company is backed by major names such as Nvidia, Softbank and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
However, the AI Search start-up also faces strong criticism. Earlier this month, Perplexity’s crawler was de-listed from leading internet security player Cloudflare as a verified bot. Cloudflare, which protects an estimated 24m websites, said that Perplexity was employing “stealth crawling behaviour”, accusing the company of circumventing website preferences by obscuring their crawling identity.
This is not the first time Perplexity has been accused of unfair ‘scraping’ of content. The BBC threatened in June to take legal action against Perplexity, accusing the start-up of scraping its content to train AI models, and previous complaints have come from the Dow Jones and The New York Times.
Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.
Perplexity co-founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas. Image: TechCrunch via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)