June 20 (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.