When Aravind Srinivas took the stage at YCombinator’s AI Startup School, the Perplexity AI chief executive had a bracing message for the roomful of would be founders: assume the giants will clone your best ideas, and build as if they already have.

Srinivas knows the playbook firsthand. Perplexity launched in December 2022 as an “answer engine” whose chatbot could crawl the live web—a capability missing from ChatGPT and Google’s Bard at the time. Within months, Google added real time search to Bard (now Gemini), OpenAI rolled out browsing for ChatGPT, and Anthropic’s Claude followed suit in 2025.

“They raise tens of billions, they need fresh revenue, and they will copy anything that’s good,” Srinivas told the audience. “You’ve got to live with that fear.”

From Answer Engine to Browser Challenger

Rather than retreat, Perplexity has doubled down on speed and differentiation. On 9 July the company unveiled Comet, an AI centric browser that bakes Perplexity’s answer engine directly into the navigation bar, promising instant summaries, live web citations, and personalized context. Srinivas claims the integration barrier is high enough that “Big Tech cannot copy Comet” as quickly as it mimicked Perplexity’s earlier chat features.

Hours after Comet’s debut, Reuters reported that OpenAI is quietly developing its own Chrome style browser, signaling that a new front—what Perplexity’s communications chief Jesse Dwyer calls “Browser War III”—is about to erupt. Both OpenAI and Google, he warned, could lean on their incumbent platforms to “drown out” smaller rivals by bundling browsers with other must have services.

The Copycat Economy

Srinivas’s cautionary lesson taps into a broader reality of the AI boom. Deep pocketed firms under shareholder pressure to justify multibillion dollar capital expenditure lines now view nimble startups as live idea labs. Meta recently snapped up voice tech outfit PlayAI, while Google lured Windsurf’s CEO and R&D team for a reported $2.4 billion licensing pact.

In the same week, Cognition Labs acquired Windsurf’s remaining assets to fortify its own autonomous coding tool, Devin—a flurry of split deals that showed founders can be dismembered as readily as they’re acquired.

Perplexity, backed by Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, has itself fielded overtures; Srinivas told Business Insider he has no intention of selling. Instead, he is betting on pace: Perplexity mandates internal use of AI coding agents to cut prototyping from days to hours, and it ships upgrades to its engine weekly. The goal, he says, is to iterate faster than a giant can integrate.

Stakes for Users—and the Web

Dwyer argues that if dominance in AI browsers coalesces around one or two “everything companies,” consumers could face the same choice limiting bundling that defined earlier browser battles. “Browser wars should be won by users,” he wrote in a company blog, “not by monopolistic tactics that force a product onto the market.”

Perplexity’s strategy is to keep its engine open to the public web while layering premium features—such as larger context windows and image analysis—behind a subscription tier. Comet extends that posture: live citations next to every answer, side by side comparisons of sources, and a data privacy pledge not to track users across sites.

Whether that will be enough against incumbents with vast distribution remains to be seen. Google commands roughly two thirds of global browser share via Chrome, while Microsoft pushes Edge through Windows defaults. If OpenAI enters the fray backed by Microsoft, competition could hinge not just on innovation, but on regulatory scrutiny of bundling practices—a replay of antitrust debates from the late 1990s browser wars.

Lessons for Founders

For the students at YC’s event, Srinivas distilled his advice to two imperatives: work incredibly hard and ship relentlessly, assuming knock offs will appear. “Speed is your moat,” he said. Differentiation must come from product depth—like Comet’s integrated answer layer—rather than from any single feature that a trillion dollar rival can replicate overnight.

Yet he closed on a note of guarded optimism. Innovation cycles move faster than ever, he said, and a nimble startup can still outrun the giants by pivoting before the copy lands. In a market where the cost of experimentation is collapsing, the next breakout advantage is likely to be cultural—an ability to live with the fear of being copied and still keep building.