Obviously there have been many editorial changes at the formerly venerable Washington Post, a tawdry saga which I don’t intend to recap here.

What I do want to share is this, which I spotted yesterday during research.

A screen cap of the Washington Post's site, offering free access to Post stories if you download the Comet browser from PerplexityAI

A screen cap of the Washington Post’s site, offering free access to Post stories if you download the Comet browser from PerplexityAI. The two story masthead images in the background – a floor caked in mud and filth, and an American flag – are inadvertently perfect.

In other words – you get free access to news if you download PerplexityAI’s proprietary browser, which is built entirely around agentic AI.

*grinds teeth into powder*

Leaving aside the idea of access to any form of content being conditional on the use of a proprietary browser, which is a particularly horrid 1990s throwback, I’m going to call this day 0 of an experiment in shifting the funding model of journalism from adtech to agentic AI.

Journalism (or what’s left of it now) is in the state it’s in because of the adtech funding model. I don’t know what the solution is.

But it sure as fuck isn’t trading one privacy-obliterating technology for another, packaged as opportunity.

The Author

I’m a UK tech policy wonk based in Glasgow. I work for an open web built around international standards of human rights, privacy, accessibility, and freedom of expression. The content and opinions on this site are mine alone and do not reflect the opinions of any current or previous team.