In a striking revelation, Cloudflare has exposed Perplexity for impersonating Google to scrape data without permission, drawing parallels to the tactics of North Korean hackers. This incident underscores the critical importance of ethical behavior in the rapidly evolving landscape of AI, where the temptation to cut corners can lead to severe repercussions. Cloudflare’s innovative approach involved creating unpublished test sites that were explicitly off-limits to crawlers, only to find that Perplexity resorted to stealth tactics when blocked.