Perplexity Accused of Stealth AI Crawling, Cloudflare Warns of “Undeclared Bots” Circumventing Website Blocks

Perplexity AI, the research startup on artificial intelligence often increased as Google challenger, is once again under fire to have allegedly collected content on websites without consent – this time strong Cloudflare criticisms, one of the largest web infrastructure providers in the world.

According to a report published by Cloudflare, Perplexity web robots have continued to access and scratch the content of websites that have explicitly removed from this activity via tools such as robots. Society claims that Perplexity robots “intentionally obscure their identity” and engage in stealth tactics to bypass restrictions, in particular by masking as a popular web browsers like Google Chrome on MacOS.

“When we have blocked access to our test areas via common methods, Perplexity robots responded by modifying their user address and IP address to continue to scrape,” said Cloudflare in the report.

Cloudflare also alleges that the IA company operates the rotary IP addresses and modifies the autonomous system numbers (ASN) – unique identifiers attributed to the networks – to bypass the blocks and avoid detection. According to Cloudflare, this stealth activity has extended to tens of thousands of websites and millions of requests per day.

This is not the first time that perplexity has been accused of bypassing digital limits. In mid-2023, the startup was captured of indexing content from media based on a subscription and remuneration without authorization. At the time, the CEO of Perplexity, Aravind Srinivas, deflected criticism, blaming the question on third-party skyscrapers operating on behalf of the company. But now, with the claims of Cloudflare, the boom in the company’s data collection practices is only intensifying.

In response to the last report, Perplexity spokesperson Jesse Dwyer rejected Cloudflare’s conclusions as an “advertising stroke”. He told the penis that the blog post contained “a lot of misunderstandings”. However, the report prompted Cloudflare to bring the perplexity as a “checked bot” and to deploy additional protections that block its default scrapers.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, a vocal critic of unregulated AI content harvesting, recently warned what he described as an “existential threat” for content creators and IA societies. In June, Cloudflare launched new checks allowing websites to demand payment of AI companies for data access, effectively tightening the screws of those who try to extract information without consent.

“AI crawlers have scratched limitless content. Our goal is to put power in the hands of creators while helping IA companies to innovate.

“It is a question of protecting the future of a free and dynamic internet with a new model that works for everyone,” said the CEO.

The accusation of conflict between AI startups and infrastructure companies like Cloudflare occurs at a time when legal issues surrounding scratch of data, copyright and consent remain unresolved. The central tension revolves around the fuel even of modern AI systems: the data. With large, hungry dataset models in constant expansion to improve performance, some companies have been accused of cutting corners in the way they get this information.

The perplexity, founded by Srinivas and supported by Jeff Bezos and Nvidia, positioned itself as a real -time search engine focused on the quote designed to counterbalance the domination of Google and Bing. But his dependence on the content on the web – including journalism – has made an objective for media companies, which were increasingly wary of their work used to train AI tools without compensation.

With more publishers adding AI blockage rules to their sites and companies like Cloudflare deploying application tools, perplexity and its peers are faced with increasing pressure to justify the way they obtain data supplying their products – and if their methods can survive a legal and reputation exam.