Amazon Reviewing Whether Perplexity AI Incorrectly Scraped Online Content

Amazon is reviewing allegations that artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI is scraping content — including from prominent news sites — without consent.

Amazon spokeswoman Samantha Mayowa confirmed Friday that the tech giant was evaluating information it received from news outlet WIRED, which published an investigation earlier this month that said Perplexity appeared to be scraping content from websites that had blocked access to such practices. Perplexity uses servers from Amazon Web Services, also known as AWS.

“Amazon’s Terms of Service prohibit abusive and illegal activities, and our customers are responsible for complying with these terms,” Mayowa said in a prepared statement. “We routinely receive reports of alleged violations from a variety of sources and work to engage our clients in understanding these reports,” she added.

Perplexity spokeswoman Sarah Blatnick said Friday that the company has determined that Perplexity-controlled services do not crawl websites in any way that violates AWS's terms of service.

The San Francisco-based AI search startup has been a darling of high-profile technology investors, including major investors like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. But in the past few weeks, the company has found itself in trouble amid accusations of intellectual theft.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has offered a strong defense of the startup after it published a news story with similar information and wording to a Forbes investigative story. It did so without citing the outlet or asking for its permission. Forbes later said it had found similar “copycat” stories taken from other publications.

Separately, the Associated Press found another product from the Perplexity series Fake quotes were invented From real people.

“We have never stolen content from anyone,” Srinivas told The Associated Press in an interview earlier this month. “Our engine is not trained on anyone else’s content, in part because we simply aggregate what other companies’ AI systems generate.”

But he added: “Forbes has accurately indicated that they would prefer to highlight the source more clearly.” Sources are now being highlighted more prominently, he said.

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Associated Press reporters Matt O'Brien and Sarah Parvini contributed to this report.