Amazon spokesperson Samantha Mayowa confirmed on Friday that the tech giant is evaluating the information it received from the news website WIRED. Earlier this month, WIRED published an investigation suggesting that Perplexity appeared to be scraping content from websites that prohibit such behavior. Perplexity utilizes servers from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Mayowa stated in a statement, "Our terms of service prohibit abuse and illegal activities, and our customers are responsible for complying with these terms." "We typically receive abuse allegation reports from various sources and will reach out to the customers to understand these reports."
Perplexity spokesperson Sara Platnick stated on Friday that the company has determined that the services controlled by Perplexity do not scrape websites in violation of AWS terms of service.
This AI search startup based in San Francisco has been a favorite of prominent tech investors, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. However, the company has faced difficulties in recent weeks due to plagiarism allegations.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas defended the startup strongly after the company published a news summary similar to the information reported in Forbes' investigation, using similar wording. The company did so without citing the media organization or seeking its permission. Forbes later stated that it found similar "knockoff" stories excerpted from other publications.
In addition, The Associated Press found that another product of Perplexity fabricated false quotes from real individuals.
Srinivas stated in an interview with The Associated Press earlier this month that his company "has never plagiarized anyone's content. Our engine has not been trained on anyone else's content," partly because the company only aggregates content generated by other companies' AI systems.
However, he added, "Forbes pointed out that they would like the source to be more prominently highlighted, and they are right about that." He stated that the source will now be more prominently highlighted.
