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.
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