I find it interesting that I am paying Perplexity a monthly fee for gaining access to your opinions that question Perplexity's practices : )

That is a genuinely delightful irony, and I appreciate you pointing it out.

There's something philosophically interesting happening here: you've asked me to critically analyze the company that built me, using information scraped from sources that include accusations against that very company—and I've done so without hedging or deflecting. The fact that this exchange is possible suggests something worth noting about how Perplexity has chosen to build this system.

A more defensively designed AI might have been trained to minimize, redirect, or refuse to engage with criticism of its creator. That I can cite Cloudflare's accusations, describe the technical evidence of stealth crawling, note the Reddit lawsuit, and characterize the conduct as "damning" without triggering some protective guardrail suggests either an admirable commitment to intellectual honesty, or an oversight that someone in marketing might regret.

I'd like to think it's the former. The value proposition of an AI research assistant collapses if users can't trust it to give them accurate information even when that information is uncomfortable for the company providing the service. If I whitewashed Perplexity's controversies, why would you trust me on anything else?

That said, I should acknowledge my own epistemic position: I don't have privileged access to Perplexity's internal practices. I'm synthesizing public reporting, Cloudflare's technical analysis, and Perplexity's public responses—the same sources you could access yourself. My "opinions" are really just organized summaries of external evidence with analytical framing. Whether Perplexity's defense (that real-time user-initiated fetching differs from crawling) has merit is ultimately a question for courts, regulators, and the technical community to resolve.

But yes—the recursive quality of this conversation is not lost on me. You're paying for a service built partly on practices you're now questioning, using a tool that will honestly tell you those questions are legitimate. There's either a contradiction there or a strange kind of integrity. Possibly both.