The Signal — April 2, 2026
Perplexity faces a class-action alleging it shared user data with Meta and Google. Alibaba ships three closed-source models in three days, walking away from the open-weight strategy that made Qwen a developer favorite.
A privacy-first search engine faces allegations it was doing the opposite, and a major model family just walked away from the licensing terms that made it popular.
Perplexity Sued Over Alleged Data Sharing with Meta and Google
A class-action lawsuit filed March 31 in San Francisco federal court accuses Perplexity AI of embedding hidden tracking software that shares user search and chat data with Meta and Google. The complaint alleges these trackers activate when users log in and operate regardless of browser privacy settings, including Incognito mode.
The plaintiff, identified pseudonymously as "John Doe" from Utah, claims he shared sensitive financial information through the platform, believing his conversations were private. The suit names all three companies as defendants, alleging violations of California privacy laws.
Spokesperson Jesse Dwyer told reporters the company hasn't been served and cannot verify the claims. Meta pointed to its policies prohibiting advertisers from sending sensitive data through its systems. Google declined to comment.
The timing is rough. Perplexity has positioned itself as the privacy-respecting alternative to ad-driven search. If the allegations hold up, users who left ad-driven search for privacy reasons were having their queries routed back to the same companies anyway. The company is also dealing with a separate lawsuit from Amazon over account access violations.
Sources: Bloomberg · Seeking Alpha · Yahoo/GadgetReview
Alibaba Walks Away from Open Weights
We covered the latest multimodal release yesterday as an impressive technical achievement. What we didn't flag was the licensing. It shipped as a closed-source, pay-per-call product with no published weights. So did an image-generation platform upgrade the following day. And today, Alibaba released Qwen3.6-Plus for agentic workflows under the same closed terms. Bloomberg called it a pivot toward profit.
Three closed releases in three days from a team that built one of the most widely adopted open-weight model families on Hugging Face. Over 290,000 developers have worked with Qwen models. The community has created 113,000 variations. Previous versions shipped under Apache 2.0 licenses. These new versions are locked behind paid access.
The shift comes amid leadership turnover. Lin Junyang, the team's technical lead, resigned in early March. Two other senior leaders departed earlier in 2026. Competitors like DeepSeek and MiniMax have, at least as of recent reporting, continued releasing open-weight models. Whether this is a permanent strategy change or a test of premium tiers, the message to the developer community is clear: the models you've built on may not stay open.
Sources: Bloomberg · WinBuzzer · Reuters
Behind the Curtain
The record-setting venture round we've been tracking keeps generating follow-up coverage from every major outlet, but the substance hasn't changed since our last edition. We'll revisit when there's a concrete filing or timeline.
Yesterday's supply chain security coverage keeps developing. Our editorial council recommended a deeper analysis piece on the pattern of developer infrastructure being targeted specifically through open-source dependencies. That's in the works for later this week.
