The AI startup perplexity nearing a deal with Samsung to integrate its chatbot onto phones.

Our dear Derbosa has that story in today's tech check. Morning, Dee.

Hey, good morning, Carl. So distribution, it's the new AI battleground. A source close to those talks

confirms to me that Samsung is close to a wide-ranging deal that would make perplexity.

The default assistant on its upcoming devices, now, this would

be a huge win for perplexity because in tech, defaults drive behavior. There's a reason that Google

has shelled out $20 billion plus for that pull position in search on Apple and Samsung devices,

because whoever owns the default wins the users, the data, and ultimately the market.

Now, same goes for AI, and Samsung is a key gatekeeper controlling a fifth of global

smartphone shipments. Locking in that front door, that would give perplexity a massive runway

to train, scale, and monetize. At Google's expense, Now, Google isn't just the default search engine on Samsung devices.

It also powers Samsung's built-in voice assistant, and it underpins large parts of the Android ecosystem.

So a perplexity deal, that would threaten to chip away at all of that.

Now, it also comes as Apple weighs a similar move in a very rare disclosure during the Google antitrust trial,

one of them. Apple's Eddie Q revealed that the company had begun talks with perplexity,

saying they were impressed with the product and exploring integration. And I spoke to Dmitri

Chevalenko, that's the startup's business lead. And he told me that they were just as surprised

to see Q go public,

because if there's one rule when dealing with Apple, it's this. You don't talk about doing

business with Apple. Yet here was Q breaking protocol and signaling serious interest. That's a big

deal. And this is really where the AI distribution battle starts to take shape. Look at this wall

here, this graphic. Open AI is expected to be

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