What the Perplexity Lawsuits Teach Us About Integrity and Trust

By Dan Nottingham, Founder and CEO, AmICredible

Every few months, a story breaks that reminds us how fragile trust really is. The most recent example involves Perplexity.ai, a company that has been positioning itself as a reliable guide to information online. Several organizations have now filed lawsuits against them, claiming copyright violations, unauthorized scraping, and misuse of personal data.

Perplexity.ai is not alone. In June of this year, Reddit filed a lawsuit against Anthropic for allegedly scraping content from Reddit over 100,000 times. And in September, Apple was sued by Hendrix in a class action lawsuit brought by book authors against companies developing LLM-based tools.  

Whenever suits like these happen, it sparks predictable debates about the legal issues and the technical details. But the larger lesson is simple. It is impossible to build a platform that people rely on for truth if your own practices are not grounded in transparency from the start.

Trust does not begin with the content you produce. It begins with the choices you make behind the scenes. It begins with the standards you use when no one is watching. If you cannot trust a company’s decisions, it becomes very hard to trust its output. When the foundation is shaky, everything built on top eventually leans the same direction.

This matters even more for companies in the information space. If you want to call yourself a neutral source, a guide, a curator, a broker of facts, you cannot separate that role from the rest of your business. Integrity is not something you switch on when it is time to publish. It has to permeate hiring, leadership, engineering, partnerships, security, and culture. 

If you cut corners to get data, or if you play fast and loose with privacy, or if you treat other people’s work as free fuel for your own engine, the message is clear. You are not here to serve the public. You are here to serve yourself.

And once that becomes visible, the trust is gone.

Credibility is not a feature. It is a habit. You demonstrate it every day through thousands of small decisions that signal who you are and what you stand for. If one of those decisions undermines trust, the damage spreads in every direction. When a company that claims to be a guide to accurate information is accused of violating the rules that protect information, the contradiction is impossible to ignore.

Being deliberate and intentional about transparency is the only way to build trust going forward. With AmICredible, we are building a better platform that empowers transparency and does not hide from it. We reduce bias by checking against multiple language models and a range of credible sources for a consensus based on fact. Users of AmICredible can evaluate claims, challenge ideas, and understand the context behind what they encounter with transparency and trust. 

We cannot do any of this unless our own behavior reflects the values we promote. If we want people to take credibility seriously, we have to take it seriously too. 

That means being transparent.
That means being careful with data.
That means doing things the right way, even when the wrong way is faster and easier.

Our vision is clear. “By fostering accountability and promoting an open dialogue, we will create a global environment where individual ideas and beliefs are shared responsibly, with truth as the foundation.” That cannot just be a sentence on a wall. It has to shape the entire organization. It has to guide the choices we make as a team, the people we hire, the partnerships we pursue, and the standards we hold ourselves to.

People are tired of platforms that ask for trust they have not earned. They want companies that walk the walk. Companies that show integrity not only when it is convenient, but when it is difficult. Companies that treat credibility as a responsibility, not a marketing strategy.

This is the example we want to set. Not because it is easy, but because it is necessary. If you want to help people navigate the truth, you have to be trustworthy first. That is the lesson the Perplexity situation reinforces. And it is the principle that will continue to guide every decision we make at AmICredible.