Perplexity’s Aravind Srinivas Warns Founders: “Big Tech Will Copy Anything That Works”—as Browser War III Brews

When Aravind Srinivas went on stage at the Ycombinator IA start -up school, the Director General of the Perplexity of AI had a offender message for the founding room: suppose that the giants will clone your best ideas and build as if they have already done so.

Srinivas knows the first -hand game book. Perplexity was launched in December 2022 as a “response engine” whose chatbot could explore the web live – a missing capacity of Chatgpt and Google’s Bard at the time. In a few months, Google added real -time research to Bard (now Gemini), Openai deployed navigation for Chatgpt and Claude d’Anthropic followed in 2025.

“They raise tens of billions, they need new income and they will copy everything that is good,” Srinivas told the public. “You have to live with this fear.”

Rather than withdrawing, perplexity has doubled speed and differentiation. On July 9, the company unveiled Comet, a browser centered on the AI that collects the Perplexity response engine directly in the navigation bar, promising instant summaries, live web quotes and personalized context. Srinivas claims that the integration barrier is high enough so that “Big Tech cannot copy the comet” as quickly as it has imitated the previous cat features of Perplexity.

A few hours after the beginnings of Comet, Reuters reported that Optai was quietly developing her own chromed style browser, pointing out that a new front – which communications chief of Perplexity, Jesse Dwyer, calls “Browser War III” – is about to burst. OPENAI and Google, he warned, could rely on their platforms in place to “drown” smaller rivals by grouping browsers with other essential services.

Srinivas’ edifying lesson draws from a broader reality of AI boom. Deep pocket companies under the press of shareholders to justify the capital expenditure lines of several billion dollars consider startups nimble as live ideas laboratories. Meta recently took hold of the Playai vocal technology, while Google attracted the CEO and the Windsurf R&D team for a license pact of $ 2.4 billion.

During the same week, Cognition Labs acquired the remaining Windsurfing assets to strengthen its own autonomous coding tool, Devin – a wave of divided offers that showed that the founders can be dismembered as easily as they are acquired.

The perplexity, supported by Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, has itself set up openings; Srinivas told Business Insider that he did not intend to sell. Instead, he bet on the pace: perplexity requires the internal use of AI coding agents to reduce the prototyping of days to hours, and he sends improvements to his engine each week. The goal, he says, is to iterate faster than a giant can only integrate it.

Dwyer argues that if domination in AI browsers is based on one or two “companies of everything”, consumers could cope with the same choice limiting the grouping that defined the previous browser battles. “Navigator wars should be won by users,” he wrote in a corporate blog, “not by monopolistic tactics that force a product on the market.”

Perplexity’s strategy is to keep its engine open on the public web while superimposing premium features, such as larger context windows and an image analysis – at a subscription level. Comet extends this posture: live quotes next to each response, comparisons side by side of sources and data confidentiality commitment so as not to follow users on the sites.

It remains to be seen if this will be sufficient against the holders with a large distribution. Google controls approximately two -thirds of the Global Board Sharing via Chrome, while Microsoft Pousse Edge via Windows default settings. If Openai enters the scrum supported by Microsoft, competition could depend not only on innovation, but on the regulatory examination of regrouping practices – a replay of antitrust debates of the late 1990s.

For students of the YC event, Srinivas distilled his advice with two imperatives: work incredibly hard and shipped tirelessly, assuming that the Knock-Off will appear. “Speed is your ditch,” he said. Differentiation must come from the depth of the product – such as the integrated response layer of Comet – rather than any functionality that a rival of a dollars Billion can reproduce overnight.

However, he closed on a note of kept optimism. The innovation cycles move faster than ever, he said, and an agile startup can still exceed the giants by swivel before the copy lands. In a market where the cost of experimentation collapses, the next advantage in small groups is probably cultural – an ability to live with the fear of being copied and continuing to build.