New York Times Sues AI Search Startup Perplexity Over Copyright Infringement
The New York Times files a copyright lawsuit against Perplexity, accusing the AI search company of stealing paywalled content to generate answers. The legal action serves as leverage to force AI firms into licensing agreements that properly compensate publishers.
The New York Times files a lawsuit against AI search startup Perplexity for copyright infringement, marking the newspaper's second legal action against an AI company. The suit claims Perplexity uses the outlet's content without permission to create commercial products that directly substitute for the original journalism. This legal move aligns with similar actions from other media outlets, including the Chicago Tribune, which also files suit this week.
The lawsuit targets Perplexity's retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology, which crawls the web to gather information and generate responses for users. The Times argues this system steals content from behind its paywall and delivers verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions to non-subscribers in real time. Additionally, the newspaper claims Perplexity's search engine hallucinates information and falsely attributes it to The Times, causing significant damage to the publication's brand.
Publishers view these lawsuits as essential leverage in ongoing negotiations with AI companies to secure fair licensing agreements. While Perplexity attempts to address compensation concerns through its Publishers' Program and recent licensing deals with organizations like Getty Images, The Times firmly rejects these efforts as insufficient. The newspaper states it will continue to hold AI companies accountable until they properly recognize and pay for the value of original journalistic work.