New York Times Sues AI Search Engine Perplexity Over Copyright Infringement
The New York Times files a federal lawsuit accusing Perplexity of illegally scraping and reproducing its copyrighted journalism. The legal action highlights growing tensions between media publishers and artificial intelligence companies.
The New York Times files a lawsuit against Perplexity, accusing the artificial intelligence startup of illegally copying and distributing its copyrighted content. The legal complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges that Perplexity unlawfully scrapes the newspaper's stories, videos, and podcasts to generate answers for user queries. The suit claims the AI platform produces outputs that are identical or substantially similar to The Times' original journalism.
This legal action follows a similar copyright lawsuit filed by the Chicago Tribune against Perplexity just one day earlier. A spokesperson for The Times states that while the publication believes in the ethical development of AI, it firmly objects to Perplexity's unlicensed use of its work to build and promote commercial products. Perplexity, which raises over $1.5 billion from major investors like Nvidia, dismisses the lawsuit by comparing it to historical media battles against new technologies like radio and the internet.
The lawsuit represents the latest effort by a major media company to protect its intellectual property during the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence. The Times is already engaged in a separate, ongoing copyright lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI over the alleged unauthorized use of its articles to train AI models. These mounting legal challenges show that traditional publishers are aggressively demanding compensation and control over how their content fuels AI systems.