Amazon is investigating allegations that the AI ​​startup Perplexity AI is scraping together content – ​​including from well-known news sites – without permission.
Amazon spokeswoman Samantha Mayowa confirmed on Friday that the tech giant was evaluating information it received from news outlet WIRED, which published an investigation earlier this month saying Perplexity appears to gather content from web sites which have banned access to such practices. Perplexity uses servers from Amazon Web Services, also generally known as AWS.
Amazon’s “terms of service prohibit abusive and illegal activities, and our customers are responsible for complying with those terms,” ​​Mayowa said in a prepared statement. “We regularly receive reports of suspected abuse from a variety of sources and engage with our customers to understand these reports.”
Perplexity spokeswoman Sara Platnick said Friday that the corporate has determined that services controlled by Perplexity don’t crawl web sites in a fashion that violates AWS’s terms of service.
The San Francisco-based AI search engine startup is a darling of distinguished tech investors, including heavyweights like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. But in recent weeks the corporate has run into trouble over allegations of plagiarism.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas vigorously defended the startup after it published a summary news story with information and similar wording to a Forbes investigative story, without citing the media outlet or asking for its permission. Forbes later said it found similar “copycat” stories from other publications.
Independently, the Associated Press found one other Perplexity product invented false quotes by real people.
Srinivas said in an AP interview earlier this month that his company has “never stolen content from anyone. Our engine is not trained on anyone else’s content,” partly because the corporate simply aggregates what other firms’ AI systems generate.
However, he added: “Forbes has rightly pointed out that it prefers to highlight the source more clearly.” He said sources at the moment are highlighted more clearly.
