Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC on Monday that the company is planning to go public in 2028, independent of how markets receive the imminent Anthropic and OpenAI listings. “Agnostic of these two companies, we were planning for something in 2028, so that still remains the case,” Srinivas said.

The statement is Srinivas’s most concrete IPO commitment to date. Perplexity was last valued at $20 billion following a $200 million round in September 2025, according to Silicon Republic.

The IPO Context

Srinivas’s comments arrive during an unprecedented convergence of AI listings. Anthropic filed its S-1 confidentially on June 1. OpenAI filed its own confidential IPO paperwork on June 8. SpaceX begins trading this week at a targeted $1.75 trillion valuation, according to Silicon Republic.

Srinivas acknowledged the stakes. “I certainly think there will be ripple effects if they don’t go well. The SpaceX IPO this week will definitely be a leading indicator to how Anthropic or OpenAI will go out,” he told CNBC. He added that both frontier labs “deserve their high valuations” because they remain on the technological frontier, but warned that six months without a capability advance from either company would be “a problem for them.”

Comet and the Agent Commerce Problem

Perplexity’s IPO ambitions rest partly on Comet, its AI browser agent that can autonomously browse, research, and make purchases on behalf of users. The company also launched “Computer” earlier this year, described as a general-purpose “digital worker” that can “build a website, analyse a dataset, or research a market” over hours or months of autonomous operation.

The agent commerce model has drawn legal fire. Amazon sued Perplexity over Comet making autonomous purchases on behalf of users, according to Silicon Republic. Cloudflare separately delisted Perplexity’s crawler from the 24 million websites it protects, alleging stealth crawling tactics. The BBC, New York Times, Wired, and Forbes have also brought or threatened legal action over content scraping.

The Cost Question

Srinivas addressed enterprise AI spending, responding to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s reported comments that AI costs are a “huge issue” for companies. Perplexity’s approach routes queries to whichever model best fits the task, including open-source alternatives when they perform comparably.

“If there is an open source model that gets the job done 90% of the time, I’d probably use that if it’s 10 to 20 times cheaper than the frontier model,” Srinivas told CNBC. “The future is still awesome for frontier intelligence, but it’s not going to be mindless spending.”

The 2028 timeline gives Perplexity roughly two years to resolve its legal disputes before facing public market scrutiny. An IPO prospectus will require disclosing all pending litigation, and the Amazon, Cloudflare, and publisher disputes collectively challenge the core mechanics of how Comet operates: scraping content, navigating commercial sites, and executing transactions autonomously. Whether the agent commerce model survives contact with copyright law and platform terms of service will determine whether Perplexity’s $20 billion valuation holds at listing.