Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI has made a surprise $34.5 billion (£25.6 billion) takeover bid for Google Chrome, the world’s most popular web browser.

The three-year-old firm, whose backers include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and chip maker Nvidia, is led by a former Google and OpenAI employee. The proposed bid is nearly twice Perplexity’s estimated valuation of $18 billion in July, although the company has said that several interested investors are willing to support the deal.

Perplexity, known for its eponymous chatbot and LLM-powered search engine, said in a comment to the BBC that the bid represents an “important commitment to the open web, user choice, and continuity for everyone who has chosen Chrome.” The startup added that moving Chrome to an independent operator focused on user safety would benefit the public.

Chrome currently has an estimated three billion users. However, the proposed deal is being met with scepticism, with many branding it a stunt – beyond this, it’s not clear whether the platform is even for sale.

Perplexity’s bid comes after Google lost an antitrust suit initiated by the US Department of Justice last year.

The judge in the case ruled that Google maintains an illegal monopoly in the internet search industry, and one potential remedy under consideration would be for Google to divest itself of the Chrome browser. The Department of Justice’s filing maintained that this would create a more equal playing field for search engine competitors.

Google has not announced any plans to divest the browser or change its business model. In an update on it’s blog, the company said that the ruling was emblematic of a “radical interventionist agenda” and vowed to contest the decision.

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If the acquisition were to succeed, it would give Perplexity a significant foothold in the AI arms race, where it competes with larger firms such as Google, Meta, and OpenAI. While Perplexity lacks comparable capital for recruiting engineers, ownership of the world’s largest browser could strengthen the company’s efforts to develop its agentic search engine AI models.

Perplexity’s latest product is Comet, an AI-powered search engine launched last month. The start-up has not provided details on how the proposed Chrome deal would be funded.