Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched an investigation into Perplexity AI, an AI search startup backed by the Bezos family and Nvidia, over potential violations of AWS rules. The inquiry focuses on whether Perplexity AI used an AWS-hosted server to scrape websites that attempted to prevent such actions. This investigation follows a report from WIRED that revealed the use of a secret AWS-hosted virtual machine by Perplexity AI to conduct the scraping activities. Amazon emphasizes that clients must respect the robots.txt file, which indicates which parts of a website can be accessed by web crawlers. Perplexity AI has a $3B valuation.
