Cybersecurity firm Cloudflare accused AI company Perplexity, led by IIT Madras alumnus Arvind Srinivas, of employing stealth crawling techniques to bypass website restrictions, including using undeclared user agents and IP rotation to access blocked content. Perplexity defended itself, asserting it provides real-time summaries for user queries rather than storing data, challenging Cloudflare’s characterization of its operations as malicious. The dispute highlights the tension between web crawlers and content providers, with Cloudflare responding to customer complaints about unauthorized access and ultimately de-listing Perplexity as a verified bot, which may have broader implications for AI and web interactions.