Amazon Is Investigating Perplexity Over Claims of Scraping Abuse
What evidence did Forbes report regarding Perplexity's practices?
Forbes reported that Perplexity appears to be plagiarizing journalists' work through its feature, Perplexity Pages, which lets people curate content on a particular topic. Multiple posts curated by the Perplexity team on its platform were strikingly similar to original stories from publications, including Forbes, CNBC, and Bloomberg. The posts did not mention the publications by name in the article text, with attributions being small, easy-to-miss logos that linked out to them.
How does Perplexity AI allegedly violate AWS terms of service?
Perplexity AI allegedly violates AWS terms of service by scraping websites that have forbidden access through the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a common web standard. AWS customers are required to adhere to the robots.txt standard while crawling websites, and Perplexity's actions may be in violation of this rule.
How did WIRED discover Perplexity's alleged scraping activities?
WIRED discovered Perplexity's alleged scraping activities by analyzing server logs, observing a specific IP address linked to Perplexity, and testing the chatbot's ability to summarize content from websites that had forbidden access through the Robots Exclusion Protocol5.