Consumer AI

On 12 August 2025 Perplexity, a three-year-old San Francisco start-up that answers questions with short, cited summaries of web results, sent Alphabet an unsolicited, all-cash offer of about $34.5 billion for Google's Chrome browser. The non-binding term sheet was structured as an asset sale "tailored to satisfy remedy requirements" in the US government's search antitrust case, and it pledged to keep Chrome's open-source Chromium code open, to invest about $3 billion over two years and to keep Google as Chrome's default search engine, though users could change it (Reuters, reported). Perplexity said the financing was committed by unnamed investors. Its own latest valuation was about $18 billion (July 2025, reported), roughly half the offer. Google did not respond publicly; Chrome was not for sale (reported). On 2 September Judge Amit Mehta's remedies ruling declined to force a sale of Chrome, while barring Google from exclusive default contracts for Search, Chrome, Gemini and related products (reported).

The bid was never likely to succeed, and it was not really about Chrome. It was about distribution, the one thing a consumer AI product built on rented models cannot rent. On 12 October 2026, in this chapter's other case, Character Technologies, the company behind the companion app Character.AI, filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware with assets and liabilities each estimated at $50–100 million (court filing). In 2024 it had been one of the most-used AI apps by time spent. This chapter explains why consumer AI is the fastest-adopted product category on record and one of the hardest to make pay.