So this happened last week and I'm still a little stuck on it: Perplexity, the AI search startup that was valued at something like $18 billion in its last funding round, sent Google an unsolicited offer to buy Chrome. For $34.5 billion. In cash.
Let that sit for a second. A company worth roughly half that amount offered to pay more than its own valuation for a browser that isn't even for sale, from a company that has shown zero indication it wants to sell. Perplexity says the backers are "off balance sheet" investment firms, which is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I don't have $34.5 billion lying around and I doubt they do either, at least not liquid and ready to wire.
The context, if you've been ignoring the DOJ antitrust stuff (fair, it's been dragging on forever): a federal judge ruled last year that Google has to make changes because of its illegal search monopoly, and one of the remedies the DOJ pushed for was forcing Google to divest Chrome entirely. Google is appealing, the case is still working through what the actual penalty looks like, and nobody expects a Chrome sale to be ordered outright, let alone soon. So Perplexity's bid isn't really a bid. It's a flag planted in the ground so that if divestiture does happen, they've already got a number on the table and their name in every headline about it.
And it worked, in the sense that I'm writing about it and so is everyone else. That's the part that bugs me a little. I don't think this is a serious offer so much as it is a very expensive press release. Compare it to what OpenAI reportedly said back in the spring when this divestiture idea first floated around, that they'd be interested in Chrome too if it ever came up. At least that felt like a passing comment in an interview. This is a formal letter with a number attached, sent specifically so it'd leak.
I'll admit some of my annoyance here is personal. I still use Chrome as my daily browser (yes, I know, I know, I've got three separate browsers installed for different accounts because juggling work and personal Google logins in one profile is a nightmare, don't get me started) and the idea that its future gets decided by whichever AI company throws the biggest fake number at a courtroom feels backwards. Chrome has like 3 billion users. Whoever ends up controlling it, if it ever comes to that, should probably not be decided by a bidding war dressed up as inevitability.
It's also worth remembering this landed in a week where basically all AI-news oxygen was going to GPT-5, which OpenAI shipped a few days earlier and immediately caught heat for retiring GPT-4o out from under paying subscribers without much warning. People were furious enough that Sam Altman walked it back within days and brought 4o back as an option. I've got mixed feelings on GPT-5 itself, it's clearly better at some coding tasks in the quick tests I ran, but the rollout was a mess and reminded me why I don't jump on new model releases the day they drop anymore. I wait a week, let the internet find the weird edge cases, then decide if it's worth switching my default.
Anyway. Back to Perplexity. What actually strikes me about the Chrome bid is how normal this kind of move has become. Five years ago a startup making a nine-figure symbolic offer for a product that isn't for sale would've been treated as a joke, maybe a Fake headline on some tech satire site. Now it's Tuesday. I don't know if that says something about how AI money has warped everyone's sense of scale, or if it's just that PR has always worked like this and I'm only noticing it now because the numbers got so big they became funny again.
Either way, mark my calendar: if Google ever actually has to sell Chrome, I want to see who's really writing that check, because it will not be Perplexity's own pocket doing the paying.