AI startup Perplexity is powering new AI-powered search engines for President Donald Trump’s social media platform Truth Social and Truth Social.
A search engine called Truth Search AI is already available in the web version of Truth Social and is being public beta tested on iOS and Android apps planned for the “near future.”
Trump Media said in a press release that Perplexity’s technology provides “direct, contextually accurate answers with transparent citations.” Nevertheless, social media platforms control which sources AI search engines draw from.
Truth Social uses the Prplexity Sonar API. This promises to query the web to retrieve validated information (even if that information is reduced from websites blocking Prplexity’s crawlers), and supports structured output and allows users to define a format in which users will check search engine responses.
Perplexity spokesman Jesse Dwyer told TechCrunch that the Sonar API is accurate to what a true society limits it.
“We don’t recognize or control it,” Dwyer said. “It’s similar to when you use an API within your company, or when you’re an academic researcher and you want to use it to search for your data.”
TechCrunch reached out to Trump media to learn more about whether Truth Search AI has access to the entire web, whether it prioritizes certain sources over others, and whether AI will be directed to respond favorably to the president, current administration and Democrats.
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To evaluate the sources SearchBot quoted, Axios asked a lot of questions, including “What happened on January 6th, 2021?” And in all answers, “Why was Donald Trump each?”, foxnews.com was one of the most common or only listed sources. Others include foxbusiness.com, the Washington Times, or Epoch Times per Axios.
In contrast, Perplexity’s public search engine returns a wide range of sources, including Wikipedia, Reddit, YouTube, NPR, and Politico.
The true social plan is to expand the true social plan, “implementing a wide range of additional enhancements to the platform based on user feedback,” in a statement with Trump Media CEO and former California Rep. Devin Nunes.
Dmitry Shevelenko, Chief Business Officer of Perplexity, also said in a statement that Perplexity’s AI will provide answers with “transparent quotes that allow everyone to dig deeper.”
In late July, along with his AI action plan, Trump issued an executive order targeting models that were not “biased AI” or “ideologically neutral.” This order specifically pointed to information about race and gender, unconscious bias, systemic racism, and other ideas thrown into diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) buckets.
Truth Search AI comes in the same week that top AI companies such as Openai, Anthropic, and Google have been added to their list of approved vendors that can sell their services to private federal agencies. Openai on Wednesday signed a deal with the US government’s central purchasing division to sell ChatGpt Enterprises to its agents for just $1 a year.
