Have a .gov email address? You can get Perplexity Pro free for a year – here’s now

If you’re a government employee with a .gov email address, you can get a free year’s use of a popular AI tool.

Perplexity is offering a free one-year subscription to Perplexity Pro to anyone with an official email address ending in .gov. This applies to not only federal employees, but state, county, and other local government workers. 

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Activating the offer is simple, as all account holders with a .gov email will see a banner appear on their Perplexity homepage prompting them to redeem a free year of Perplexity Pro. If you don’t have an account yet, you can create one from the Perplexity website for free by clicking on “Sign up.” 

“We’re happy to offer Perplexity Pro free for one year to all American public servants,” an X post about the offer read. “With frontier AI reasoning models and high-quality sources, daily searches become more streamlined, positively contributing to your day-to-day productivity at work!”

Perplexity is a free AI chatbot that works like other similar tools. It has become one of the leading names in recent months though, with ZDNET senior contributing editor Steven Vaughan-Nichols naming it his favorite chatbot, topping big names like ChatGPT and Copilot, mostly because of its depth and reliability. (No glue pizza here.)

Perplexity Pro, the version being offered here, is a paid subscription to the AI chatbot that provides bonuses such as 300 Pro searches a day; access to other powerful AI models like GPT-4 Omni, Claude 3’s Sonnet and Haiku, and Sonar Large 32k (each offering particular advantages depending on your needs); file analysis, which lets you upload PDFs, CSVs, and images and explore their contents with AI; access to a special Discord channel; and more.

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Usually, that subscription runs $20 a month or $200 a year.

The company has offered a similar deal to other groups in the past – including Comcast customers (that deal still appears to be active) and college students at one of 45 selected campuses.