Donald Trump’s media company has launched a new AI-powered search engine after teaming up with controversial artificial intelligence firm Perplexity.
Trump Media, which is majority-owned by the US President, announced the new venture as part of its social media platform Truth Social.
Powered by Perplexity, the Truth Search AI feature is integrated into the web browser version of the platform.
Trump Media’s chief executive officer, Devin Nunes, said the AI would make the social media platform “an even more vital element in the Patriot Economy”.
Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer, added: “We’re excited to partner with Truth Social to bring powerful AI to an audience with important questions.
“Curiosity is the engine of change, and Perplexity’s AI is developed to empower curiosity by delivering direct, reliable answers with transparent citations that allow anyone to dig deeper.”
Perplexity has previously been accused of plagiarism by The New York Times, New York Post and Dow Jones. It has also faced criticism in recent days after cyber security firm Cloudflare claimed that the company appeared to be secretly scraping websites without their permission.
Perplexity’s AI search engine bypassed anti-bot crawling measures in order to access content on the sites, according to Cloudflare’s report.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said: “Some supposedly ‘reputable’ AI companies act more like North Korean hackers. Time to name, shame, and hard block them.”
Perplexity responded by claiming that Cloudflare’s systems are “fundamentally inadequate for distinguishing between legitimate AI assistants and actual threats”.
The AI company also blamed a third-party service that it uses for “highly specialised tasks” for the unauthorised access.
The Independent has approached Trump Media for comment on whether Perplexity’s Truth Social search engine will use stealth crawlers to evade blocks put in place by websites.
In a press release, Trump Media said its mission was to “end Big Tech’s assault on free speech by opening up the internet and giving people their voices back”.
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