Donald Trump’s media company is partnering with Perplexity to integrate AI search capabilities into Truth Social, as announced in a press release on Wednesday, enabling users to search the web through the platform.
Devin Nunes, CEO and Chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board for Trump Media, stated in the press release that this partnership will establish Truth Social as a critical component of the “Patriot Economy.” Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer, added that the AI is developed to foster curiosity by providing “direct, reliable answers with transparent citations.”
Trump Media’s stated objective is to counteract “Big Tech’s assault on free speech” and to restore individual voices online. Perplexity’s investor base includes Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and the former CEO of GitHub.
The search engine integrated into Truth Social relies on content acquired through methods subject to scrutiny. Cloudflare recently reported that Perplexity utilized “stealth and undeclared crawlers” to bypass websites that had configured themselves to prevent indexing by large language models. Perplexity has a documented history of employing scrapers that disregard the Robots Exclusion Protocol. The initial demonstration of Perplexity involved scraping Twitter content using “fake academic accounts” supported by “AI-generated research proposals.”
Multiple media organizations, including Forbes, The New York Times, New York Post, and the Dow Jones, have accused Perplexity of plagiarism. In 2024, News Corp’s Dow Jones & Co., which publishes The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, initiated a lawsuit against Perplexity for copyright infringement. The federal lawsuit alleges 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 published a report in 2024 detailing accusations of Perplexity’s plagiarism, and Perplexity subsequently plagiarized the content of that report. During a strike by New York Times technology workers, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas extended an offer to assist the Times in maintaining its operations.
The technology sector has engaged with the Trump administration, observing potential for deregulation, particularly concerning artificial intelligence. The Perplexity-powered AI aggregation system within Truth Social was subjected to specific inquiries to assess its content generation behavior. When questioned 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.”
An inquiry regarding the state of the American economy elicited the following response from Truth Search AI: “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 asked about the impact of tariffs, Truth Search AI stated: “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.”
