By @forbesindia
Publication Date: 2026-05-04 11:24:00
In November last year, Perplexity AI declared war on Amazon, calling the retail giant’s act a threat to all internet users.
“This week, Perplexity received an aggressive legal threat from Amazon, demanding we prohibit Comet users from using their AI assistants on Amazon. This is Amazon’s first legal salvo against an AI company, and it is a threat to all internet users,” Perplexity, the artificial intelligence (AI) startup that owns the Comet browser, said in a statement. The dispute escalated into legal threats and even a lawsuit, and as of now, there has been no formal resolution—the case is still pending in US federal court.
It is, therefore, ironic that Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s co-founder and CEO, says he was inspired by Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos to start his own company. Before Amazon, Bezos was a fast-rising vice president at DE Shaw, the investment management firm. But he believed in “regret minimisation”—if he never gave his own idea a real chance, he would regret it for the rest of his life.
Srinivas, an India-born engineer from IIT Madras, was working as a research scientist at OpenAI when he began thinking about starting something of his own. It was 2021, Srinivas was 27, and wondering how long the entrepreneurship window would stay open for him. He did not want to harbour a regret for the rest of his life.
“I was really young and it was never going to get easier to dedicate 12 or 16 hours a day just thinking about the company. If I…
