(Reuters) -Apple ( AAPL ) executives have held internal talks about potentially bidding for artificial intelligence startup Perplexity, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

The discussions are at an early stage and may not lead to an offer, the report said, adding that the tech behemoth's executives have not discussed a bid with Perplexity's management.

"We have no knowledge of any current or future M&A discussions involving Perplexity," Perplexity said in response to a Reuters' request for comment.

Apple ( AAPL ) did not immediately respond to a Reuters' request for comment.

Big tech companies are doubling down on investments to enhance AI capabilities and support growing demand for AI-powered services to maintain competitive leadership in the rapidly evolving tech landscape.

Bloomberg News also reported on Friday that Meta Platforms ( META ) tried to buy Perplexity earlier this year.

Meta announced a $14.8 billion investment in Scale AI last week and hired Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang to lead its new superintelligence unit.

Adrian Perica, Apple's ( AAPL ) head of mergers and acquisitions, has weighed the idea with services chief Eddy Cue and top AI decision-makers, as per the report.

The iPhone maker reportedly plans to integrate AI-driven search capabilities - such as Perplexity AI - into its Safari browser, potentially moving away from its longstanding partnership with Alphabet's Google.

Banning Google from paying companies to make it their default search engine is one of the remedies proposed by the U.S. Department of Justice to break up its dominance in online search.

While traditional search engines such as Google still dominate global market share, AI-powered search options including Perplexity and ChatGPT are gaining prominence and seeing rising user adoption, especially among younger generations.

Perplexity recently completed a funding round that valued it at $14 billion, Bloomberg News reported. A deal close to that would be Apple's ( AAPL ) largest acquisition so far.

The Nvidia ( NVDA )-backed startup provides AI search tools that deliver information summaries to users, similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.