President Donald Trump's media company, Trump Media, announced this week it has begun beta testing a new AI-powered search engine on its Truth Social platform.
The new search feature, Truth Search AI, is powered by AI company Perplexity’s technology.
In a press release announcing the launch, Trump Media said the new feature is currently available on the web version of Truth Social, with beta testing for iOS and Android apps expected at a later date.
The statement said the feature is intended to “enhance the Truth Social platform and exponentially increase the amount of information available to its users.”
Devin Nunes, CEO of Trump Media, said in the statement that the company will review user feedback to inform its development moving forward.
“We plan to robustly refine and expand our search function based on user feedback as we implement a wide range of additional enhancements to the platform,” he said.
San Francisco-based Perplexity was founded in 2022, and has pitched itself as the world’s first “answer engine.” That is, the platform works by pulling and summarizing information directly from multiple sources.
“Curiosity is the engine of change, and Perplexity's AI is developed to empower curiosity by delivering direct, reliable answers with transparent citations that allow anyone to dig deeper,” said Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer.
Yet Perplexity has run into controversy over how it creates content, with The New York Times, the New York Post and Forbes all accusing Perplexity of plagiarism.
In June, the BBC also threatened to sue Perplexity for unauthorized use of its content, saying the platform reproduces its copy “verbatim.”
In response, Perplexity said the claims “are just one more part of the overwhelming evidence that the BBC will do anything to preserve Google's illegal monopoly.”
More recently, the company faced criticism only earlier this month, with cyber security firm Cloudflare accusing the company of secretly scraping websites without their permission.
Truth Social joins a growing list of platforms integrating generative AI, following the launch of Grok on X (formerly Twitter) by Elon Musk’s xAI in 2023, and Meta’s release of its AI chatbot in 2024.
The launch also comes amidst Trump’s push for AI development in the U.S., releasing his AI Action Plan last month which aims to secure U.S. dominance in the global AI race and dismantle regulatory barriers to AI adoption.
