Apple Discussed Buying Mistral AI and Perplexity

According to The Information, Apple executives have debated acquiring Mistral AI and Perplexity to strengthen its AI capabilities. MacRumors reports: Services chief Eddy Cue is apparently the most vocal advocate of a deal to buy AI firms to bolster the company's offerings. Cue previously supported propositions of Apple acquiring Netflix and Tesla, both of which Apple CEO Tim Cook turned down. Other executives such as software chief Craig Federighi have reportedly been reluctant to acquire AI startups, believing that Apple can build its own AI technology in-house. [...]

Apple is said to be hesitant to do a deal, which would likely cost billions of dollars. Apple has rarely spent more than a hundred million dollars on an acquisition, with Beats at $3 billion and Intel's wireless modem business at $1 billion. If a federal ruling ends the $20 billion deal between Apple and Alphabet that makes Google the default search engine on its devices, the company could be compelled to acquire an AI-powered search startup to fill that gap. For now, Apple apparently told bankers that it plans to continue with its strategy of focusing on smaller deals in AI.

Too bad about Tesla

[timeOday]

I think Tesla would have been a much more profitable company under Apple. Musk certainly got it to a point - over a million cars per year, and the single most popular car model, gas or electric. But more recently with cancelling the small cheap car, and the Cybertruck, and betting the company on robotaxi... Apple wouldn't have done any of that stuff. They'd be improving successive versions and not offending their customers with politics, and making Tesla a super-valuable company.

Re:

[Deal In One]

I dont know if Apple will be interested in a mass produced vehicle. Their image / brand is to be considered as the more pricey "better" version.

too little to late

[sziring]

Like Amazon's Alexa, Siri has some very simple AI capabilities used by the masses but neither company were actually interested in the future of AI. They had the devices and the tech back in the day but no interest in making it better. I hate that they were so neglectful of this tech and are only interested in catching up due to lost market share, not because it might be a good user experience.

My gut says buying a company or two that will be key to drive the central nervous system of Apple products will lead

Perplexity has it's own problems, scrapes copyrigh

[bsdetector101]

The Perplexity controversy centers on accusations from major news organizations, like News Corp, that its AI search engine scrapes copyrighted content from the web without permission and fails to provide proper attribution, leading to a lawsuit for copyright infringement. Furthermore, a Cloudflare report in August 2025 alleged that Perplexity bots used deceptive "stealth crawling" tactics, disguising themselves to bypass website restrictions and access blocked content. Perplexity has pushed back against the