Truth Social’s AI search is powered by Perplexity, but the platform can set limits on sources | TechCrunch

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 towards Democrats. 

To assess which sources the searchbot would cite, Axios asked it a bunch of questions — like ‘What happened on January 6, 2021? and ‘Why was Donald Trump impeached?’ In all the responses, FoxNews.com was either the most common or the only listed source of information. Others included FoxBusiness.com, The Washington Times or Epoch Times, per Axios.

In contrast, Perplexity’s public search engine returns a wider variety of sources, including Wikipedia, Reddit, YouTube, NPR, and Politico.

Truth Social plans to refine and expand the search function “based on user feedback as we implement a wide range of additional enhancements to the platform,” said Devin Nunes, CEO of Trump Media and a former California congressman, in the statement.

Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer, also noted in the statement that Perplexity’s AI delivers answers with “transparent citations that allow anyone to dig deeper.”

In late July, alongside his AI Action Plan, Trump published an executive order targeting “biased AI,” or models that aren’t “ideologically neutral.” The order specifically referred to information about race or sex, unconscious bias, systemic racism and other ideas thrown into the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bucket as “pervasive and destructive” ideology that can “distort the quality and accuracy of the output.”

Truth Search AI comes in the same week that top AI firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google were added to a list of approved vendors that can sell their services to civilian federal agencies. OpenAI on Wednesday reached a deal with the U.S. government’s central purchasing arm to sell ChatGPT Enterprise to agencies for just $1 per year.