Apple × Perplexity?
Apple has the cash, but are they thinking big enough? Perplexity or Anthropic could instantly reshape Siri, Safari, and their AI trajectory.
Originally published on LinkedIn.
Thoughts are my own and don’t reflect Apple’s views.
Bloomberg reports Apple has held early internal talks about buying Perplexity AI, the answer-engine startup and Google search competitor most recently valued at ≈ $14B.
With $48B in reserves Apple isn’t cash-poor—but it's still yet to make a significant AI move. Bringing Perplexity in-house could:
- Give Siri an instant boost.
- Reduce Safari’s dependence on Google for search. (Google paid Apple ~$20B in '22 to be the iPhones default search engine)
- Instantly add an army of AI talent, other companies are spending suitcases of cash to hire.
If Cupertino wants to be a real player, not just a installing the technology on their devices, a better target might be Anthropic (valued at $61.5B, Mar '25).
Why Anthropic > Perplexity
- Frontier models – Claude 4 already tops several benchmarks; think Sonnet 4-Lite running natively on iPhone.
- Developer synergy – Pair Xcode with Claude Code for a super-powered IDE.
- Research velocity – Dario Amodei’s team is some of the best researchers in the world , giving Apple a DeepMind-style “AI Brain-Trust”
AI valuations are seeing hockey stick style exponential growth: Anthropic soared from $18.4B (Feb '24) to $61.5B (Mar '25)—a 3× jump in 13 months. Even with all that cash on-hand I'm not sure that Apple can afford to continue to sit on the sidelines.
Takeaway: Apple has the balance-sheet fire-power buy their way into the AI game but are they thinking big enough?