Perplexity AI: Search Revolution or Compliance Risk?

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Let me share with you my short article on the subject of Perplexity. I hope you will find it worth reading. I would highly appreciate your feedback. The short poll is at the end of the post.

✔️Is your team already using Perplexity AI?

Perplexity (note: this isn't a language model) could change how we work with information, but it also brings serious risks.

✔️Scale of Usage

780 million queries per month with 20% month-over-month growth. Perplexity's current valuation hovers around $18 billion, and since investors are "voting with their dollars," they clearly see this as the future of search tools. It's a US-registered company with mostly Venture Capital funding (60%).

22 million monthly active users. The question is whether companies are consciously supporting this usage or if it's "shadow AI" as described in the interesting MIT report "The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025"?

✔️Why is Everyone Talking About This?

For managers, it means competitive analysis in minutes instead of hours, meeting prep with real-time market data, and competitive intelligence with source citations.

For IT teams, it delivers 1,200 tokens/second (3x faster than competitors). What's especially important is that one API gives you access to 8+ models (GPT-5, Claude 4.0, Gemini 2.5), for just $5 per million tokens vs. $30 at OpenAI!!!

✔️Architecture

Their proprietary Sonar model is built on Llama 3.3 70B, specialized for factual responses and real-time internet search. Thanks to Cerebras infrastructure, it achieves record-breaking speeds of 1,200 tokens per second.

They use DeepSeek R1 - Chinese reasoning technology, but running locally on Perplexity servers in the US. According to sources, data "never" leaves American infrastructure, eliminating the risk of transfer to China.

An OpenAI-compatible API ensures easy integration with existing systems, eliminating the need for code changes.

✔️Key Challenges for European Companies

Data location issue - 100% of servers are located in the US (AWS us-east-1, us-west-2), with zero dedicated servers in the EU.

The differences between plans are enormous when it comes to our input data:

FREE plan means automatic use of user data for AI training.
Pro plan ($20/month) allows opt-out from learning on data entered into Perplexity (though you need to select this in preferences consciously), data still processed in the US.
Enterprise plan ($40/user monthly) never trains on client data, but location remains in the US. Plus it provides audit logs and configurable data retention (24h-365 days).

Advertiser partnerships - Perplexity openly shares data with business partners: mobile identifiers, hashed emails, cookies. This sets them apart from OpenAI or Anthropic, who avoid such practices.

✔️US Compliance is Sorted

SOC 2 Type II certification confirms solid security standards according to US norms. HIPAA compliance ensures adherence to medical data privacy laws, crucial for the US healthcare sector.

✔️How to Safely Deploy in Europe?

A governance approach requires analysis with your company's legal team on whether data transfer to the US is acceptable under GDPR. It's worth defining upfront what can and cannot be sent to Perplexity.

If you're using the API, consider automatic anonymization of client names, project names, etc.

Choosing the right plan is crucial. FREE means you're consenting to data use for training. Pro requires manual opt-out from data retention - after you uncheck this, your information won't be used for model training. Enterprise Pro is the only option guaranteeing no training on company data without forcing you to configure it.

✔️What's Next?

2025 will be a decision year - companies that find the balance between AI innovation and data governance will start pulling ahead. The question isn't "whether" to adopt AI search, but "how safely."

What about You? Are you already using Perplexity? What are your experiences?

I never use Perplexity

I use Perplexity moslty as "chat"

I use Perplexity omstly via API

6 votes

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