A.I. Start-Up Perplexity Offers to Buy Google's Chrome Browser for $34.5 Billion

New York Times

2 days ago

In an unlikely bid that shows the growing brashness of young artificial intelligence companies, the A.I. start-up Perplexity has made an unsolicited offer to buy Google's Chrome web browser for $34.5 billion.
The tiny company made its offer against the backdrop of an upcoming antitrust decision against the tech giant. In a ruling due as early as this week, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta could force Google to sell its web browser as a way of reducing the company's dominance in the internet search market.
The Perplexity chief executive, Aravind Srinivas, said in a letter to Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google's parent company, Alphabet, that its offer to buy the Chrome browser was 'designed to satisfy an antitrust remedy in highest public interest by placing Chrome with a capable, independent operator.'
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Perplexity's offer was previously reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Perplexity is among the many companies that want to challenge Google's search engine through online chatbots and similar technologies that respond to queries with short sentences rather than just a list of links. The Chrome browser could give it an edge among Google's many challengers, including Microsoft, OpenAI and the Silicon Valley start-up You.com.
But the unsolicited bid is a long shot, since Perplexity itself is valued at an estimated $18 billion. Jesse Dwyer, a spokesman for the company, told The New York Times that outside investors had agreed to back a potential deal.
Judge Mehta ruled last year that Google had violated antitrust rules to maintain its dominance in the search market.
The Justice Department has pushed for a federal court to force Google to sell its Chrome browser in a series of aggressive remedy proposals after prevailing in its antitrust case against the search giant. The department has argued that forcing Google to divest Chrome and share search results and ads with rivals would create more competition.
The government told Judge Mehta that Google's monopoly — it controls about 90 percent of the search market — cannot be remedied without forceful structural changes to the company. And without a remedy like the sale of Chrome, Google was poised to dominate A.I., the government argued.
'This court's remedy should be forward looking and not ignore what's on the horizon,' said David Dahlquist, the government's lead litigator. 'Google is using the same strategy that they did for search and now applying it to Gemini,' he added, referring to Google's A.I. technology.
Google has argued against the sale of Chrome, proposing smaller tweaks to its business model. Perplexity and other A.I. companies testified in April during the antitrust remedies hearing by Judge Mehta that it was interested in buying Chrome.
Perplexity was founded in 2022 by a group of A.I. researchers including Mr. Srinivas, who previously worked at OpenAI. In an effort to boost usage of its A.I.-powered search engine, the company has started to offer a web browser of its own, called Comet.
The New York Times sent Perplexity a cease and desist letter last year demanding that the company stop using its content to help power its A.I. technologies.