AI startup Perplexity is powering a new AI-powered search engine on Truth Social, President Donald Trump’s social media platform.
The search engine, dubbed Truth Search AI, is already available on the web version of Truth Social, with public Beta testing on its iOS and Android apps planned for “the near future.”
Trump Media said in a press release that Perplexity’s tech provides “direct, contextually accurate answers with transparent citations” which will help Truth Social “exponentially increase the amount of information available” to users. Nonetheless, the social media platform maintains control over which sources of information the AI search engine draws from.
Truth Social is using the Perplexity Sonar API, which promises to query the web to retrieve current and verified information — even if that information is scraped from websites that block Perplexity’s crawlers — and supports structured output so users can define the format in which they’d like to see the search engine’s responses.
Jesse Dwyer, a Perplexity spokesperson, told TechCrunch that the Sonar API will be accurate to whatever sources Truth Social limits it to.
“We have no visibility or control over that,” Dwyer said. “Similar to you using the API inside of your own company or if you were an academic researcher and wanted to use it to search your own data.”
TechCrunch has reached out to Trump Media to learn more about whether Truth Search AI will have access to the entire web, whether it will prioritize certain sources over others, and whether the AI will be directed to respond favorably about the president and current administration and unfavorably toward Democrats.
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