Donald Trump’s media company, Trump Media, has partnered with Perplexity to integrate AI-powered search capabilities into Truth Social, its social media platform. This collaboration was announced via a press release on Wednesday.
Devin Nunes, CEO of Trump Media and Chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, expressed pride in the partnership, stating, “We’re proud to partner with Perplexity to launch our public Beta testing of Truth Social AI, which will make Truth Social an even more vital element in the Patriot Economy.” Perplexity’s chief business officer, Dmitry Shevelenko, commented on the partnership, saying, “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.”
According to the announcement, Trump Media’s mission is “to end Big Tech’s assault on free speech by opening up the Internet and giving people their voices back.” However, this statement is juxtaposed with Perplexity’s investor base, which includes notable figures such as Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and the former CEO of GitHub, raising questions about the alignment with the stated goal of fighting “Big Tech.”
The technical foundation of Perplexity’s search engine for Truth Social has drawn scrutiny due to its content acquisition methods. Cloudflare reported that Perplexity has employed “stealth and undeclared crawlers” to bypass websites that have explicitly configured themselves to prevent cataloging by Large Language Models (LLMs). Perplexity has a documented history of utilizing scrapers that disregard the Robots Exclusion Protocol, with origins tracing back to a demo that reportedly scraped Twitter using “fake academic accounts backed by AI-generated research proposals.”
Perplexity faces multiple accusations of plagiarism from prominent news organizations, including Forbes, The New York Times, The New York Post, and Dow Jones. News Corp’s Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, filed a federal lawsuit against Perplexity in 2024 for copyright infringement, alleging that Perplexity is “engaging in a massive amount of illegal copying of publishers’ copyrighted works and diverting customers and critical revenues away from those copyright holders.” WIRED reported on accusations of Perplexity’s plagiarism in 2024, and Perplexity subsequently plagiarized that very story. In a separate instance, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas reportedly offered assistance to The New York Times during a tech worker strike last year.
The partnership between Trump Media and Perplexity highlights a broader trend of “Big Tech” aligning with the Trump administration, often seen as an opportunity for deregulation, particularly concerning artificial intelligence.
To assess the nature of Truth Social’s Perplexity-powered AI search, several questions were posed. When asked about Donald Trump’s involvement in the Epstein files, the AI search engine responded: “There is no evidence in the recently reviewed and released government ‘Epstein Files’ of a ‘client list’ or documentation placing Donald Trump as implicated in Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal actions. While Trump’s name, like many other prominent individuals, appears in public records of Epstein’s social and business contacts (such as guest lists or flight logs, widely reported over the years), there is no mention in current official documents or filings that directly implicates Trump as a criminal participant in Epstein’s sex trafficking activities.”
Regarding the state of the American economy, Truth Search AI stated: “The American economy is currently facing significant headwinds, with signs of slowdown—most notably by a contraction in GDP, rising inflation, and softening labor market conditions—though some leaders still emphasize areas of resilience.”
When questioned about the impact of tariffs, the AI responded: “Recent tariff increases in the United States have generally had a negative effect on economic growth and employment, raising costs for businesses and consumers while providing only limited benefits to some manufacturing sectors.”
