Perplexity AI Faces Copyright Lawsuits from Japanese Media Giants Amid Growing Publisher Tensions

Asahi, Nikkei sue Perplexity AI for copyright infringement

AI search outfit Perplexity has been hit with yet another copyright lawsuit, this time courtesy of Japan's Nikkei and Asahi media companies. Nikkei and Asahi filed their joint suit on Tuesday in Tokyo District Court, claiming that the Google challenger unlawfully scraped their articles and repeatedly served up the content in response to user queries. They allege Perplexity ignored their robots.txt files to do so, echoing accusations leveled against the company earlier this month by Cloudflare. On that occasion, Perplexity insisted that overriding such crawler-blocking preferences was acceptable as long as the user is directing the search query that triggers the information retrieval. The company has not yet responded to the new suit, which seeks an injunction and damages of ¥2.2 billion ($15 million) per media firm. However, a few weeks ago, it responded to a similar suit by Japan's Yomiuri newspaper, with the claim that its practices had led to a "misunderstanding" in Japan. Japanese copyright law doesn't stop AI companies from freely training their models on copyrighted material, but it draws the line at wholly reproducing that content and interfering with the publishers' right of distribution, both of which are central claims in the Yomiuri and Nikkei/Asahi suits. The newest filing also alleges that Perplexity violated the media companies' exclusive right to adapt their own content, and accuses the firm of citing Nikkei and Asahi as the sources of "a large amount of incorrect information that differs from the actual article content," thus allegedly maligning the outlets and breaking Japanese competition law. Copyright is an increasingly fraught issue for Perplexity, which has been on the receiving end of cease-and-desist letters from the New York Times, the BBC, and Condé Nast. On Thursday, the company lost its bid to have a News Corp copyright suit dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. Days later, it announced that it would give participating publishers a cut of the subscription fee for its new Comet Plus service, which gives subscribers "direct access" to those publishers' sites and content. Perplexity first announced partnerships with media companies last July, promising to give them a cut of the revenue it earns when brands pay for the placement of follow-up questions that are answered by referencing the companies' articles. The new Comet Plus arrangement is calculated according to "human visits, search citations, and agent actions," Perplexity said on Monday. "The revenue allocation recognizes the reality that users now choose how they want to consume information: browsing manually, asking for AI-generated answers, or deploying agents for complex tasks," it added. "Publishers deserve compensation that matches this new reality." The big question is whether the scale of this compensation will provide any useful counterweight to the drastic drop-off in traffic that publishers are currently experiencing, largely thanks to AI-generated answers that reduce the likelihood of readers clicking through to articles. Google's AI Overviews in particular have been linked to traffic declines of up to 25 percent, with outlets such as Business Insider and Fortune instituting mass layoffs in response to the collapse of organic search traffic. ®

Japanese media groups sue AI search engine Perplexity over alleged copyright infringement

Two of Japan's largest media groups are suing artificial intelligence search engine Perplexity over alleged copyright infringement, joining a growing list of news publishers taking legal action against AI companies using their content. Japanese media group Nikkei, which owns the Financial Times, and the Asahi Shimbun newspaper said in statements on Tuesday that they had jointly filed a lawsuit in Tokyo. The groups join a number of Western media companies taking legal action against Perplexity, which provides answers to questions with sources and citations, using large language models (LLMs) from platforms such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The Japanese news providers claim Perplexity has, without permission, "copied and stored article content from the servers of Nikkei and Asahi" and ignored a "technical measure" designed to prevent this from happening. They claim that Perplexity's answers have given incorrect information attributed to the newspapers' articles, which "severely damages the credibility of newspaper companies". Nikkei and the Asahi are asking for damages of ¥2.2bn ($15mn) each and that Perplexity delete the stored articles. "Perplexity's actions amount to large-scale, ongoing 'free riding' on article content that journalists from both companies have spent immense time and effort to research and write, while Perplexity pays no compensation," said Nikkei in its statement. "If left unchecked, this situation could undermine the foundation of journalism, which is committed to conveying facts accurately," the two companies added. Perplexity did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The lawsuits follow a similar move by another large Japanese newspaper, the Yomiuri, and signal that publishers in the country are starting to push back against AI groups, said lawyers. "These are test cases," said Kensaku Fukui, an expert in copyright law at law firm Kotto Dori in Tokyo. Fukui said that while Japan's "copyright law is in some ways permissive for AI training for existing copyrighted works . . . there are some restrictions". Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones and the New York Post have claimed that Perplexity is diverting customers and revenues away from news publishers by using their content to answer questions on its platform via its chatbot, rather than paying or directing readers to their websites. The BBC this summer also demanded that Perplexity stop using its content to train its AI model in a "cease and desist" letter, similar to those sent previously by other outlets, including the New York Times and Condé Nast. Perplexity has introduced revenue-sharing agreements with publishers including Time, Fortune and Der Spiegel, which will pay out when an answer references their work, reflecting a shift in how AI start-ups are increasingly seeking commercial partnerships and licensing agreements with publishers. Perplexity has more than 30mn users, with the majority based in the US. Its primary source of revenue is from subscriptions.

Financial Times owner sues AI giant over copyright infringement

The owner of the Financial Times is suing an AI giant over claims it illegally scraped content from articles to train a chatbot. Nikkei has filed a lawsuit alongside the daily Japanese title The Asahi Shimbun against Perplexity AI, accusing the US tech company of copyright infringement. The two media groups allege that Perplexity used their articles without permission to help train and provide answers for its Google-style search engine since June last year. Nikkei and the Asahi also accused the company's AI software of inserting errors into responses attributed to the titles, which they said "severely damages" their credibility. The publishers said: "This course of Perplexity's actions amounts to large-scale, ongoing 'free riding' on article content that journalists from both companies have spent immense time and effort to research and write, while Perplexity pays no compensation. "If left unchecked, this situation could undermine the foundation of journalism, which is committed to conveying facts accurately, and ultimately threaten the core of democracy." The two media publishers are seeking an injunction to ensure Perplexity stops stealing content and deletes all existing data, while also seeking damages of 2.2bn yen (£11m) each. News publishers are increasingly targeting tech companies amid concerns that the rapid development of AI is fuelling widespread copyright infringement. Perplexity, which is based in San Francisco, is already facing legal action from Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal and New York Post. The BBC has also threatened an injunction against the company over claims it has ripped off the broadcaster's stories. Perplexity has branded the BBC's allegations "manipulative and opportunistic". Perplexity, which was founded in 2022, is an AI-powered search engine that enables users to search the web by asking questions in a conversational style. It runs a default language model and also provides subscribers with access to others, including ChatGPT and Claude. The company, which counts Amazon founder Jeff Bezos among its investors, has more than 30m users and last month secured an $18bn valuation following a fresh funding round. However, the joint action by Nikkei and Asahi opens up a new front in the conflict between the tech and creative industries. Nikkei, which was founded as a market news provider in 1876, has grown into one of the world's largest media organisations with roughly 1,500 journalists worldwide. It bought the Financial Times from Pearson in a £844m deal in 2015. The Left-leaning Asahi Shimbun - or "rising sun newspaper" - is one of Japan's oldest dailies and considered a paper of record in the country. Perplexity has been contacted for comment.

Perplexity wants to play nice with publishers. They keep suing it anyway.

The lawsuit is a setback to the AI search engine's efforts to play nice with online publishers, especially media organizations, whose content it heavily relies on to produce its AI answers. Perplexity's AI-powered "answer machine" crawls websites to access content, then uses that material to generate concise answers for users that include citations. The answers summarize information from multiple sources, including news articles. Many news publishers however worry that the rise of AI search engines such as Perplexity could be an existential threat to the industry, diverting audiences away from their websites and undermining their advertising and subscription models. To try and assuage some of these concerns, Perplexity has signed revenue-sharing partnerships with outlets including Fortune, Time, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and the Los Angeles Times, and has promised to give partner organizations access to its enterprise tools to build their own AI products. Perplexity also recently launched a program allowing publishers to share revenue generated from their content through its Comet web browser and AI assistant. The startup has allocated $42.5 million for the initiative, with publishers receiving 80% of revenue from a new subscription tier, Comet Plus. Publishers will earn money when their articles drive traffic through Comet, appear in search queries, or assist users via the AI assistant. Perplexity, which was founded in 2022, was last valued at $18 billion in a July funding round. The company regularly speaks of the importance of journalism for its product. Jessica Chan, the company's head of publishing partnerships, previously told Fortune that the company needs a "thriving journalism and digital publishing ecosystem" and "continual production" of journalistic information to succeed. "There is really no world in which Perplexity is successful but publishers are not," she said. However, these efforts haven't managed to prevent a growing list of media companies from pursuing legal action against the AI startup. Perplexity has faced legal threats from the BBC for scraping and verbatim use of content without consent, as well as Forbes and Wired for republishing proprietary content without citation. It's also currently battling a copyright suit from News Corp'sDow Jones and The New York Post. Just last week, the company failed to convince a New York federal court to dismiss or transfer the News Corp lawsuit. The News Corp case and the latest lawsuit brought by Nikkei and Asahi make similar claims but will be assessed under different copyright law. In Japan, AI training on existing copyrighted works is partially permitted, but restrictions apply when content is copied or stored without consent or when publishers' technical safeguards are ignored. In contrast, U.S. copyright law generally offers stronger protections for publishers, with courts scrutinizing reproduction and commercial use of content. Nikkei and Asahi's lawsuit also claims that Perplexity has damaged the papers' credibility by providing incorrect summaries and information falsely attributed to the newspapers' articles, violating the Unfair Competition Prevention Act, a Japanese law that prohibits various forms of unfair competition to ensure fair practices in the market and protect businesses from misconduct such as misleading advertising. In a statement shared with the Financial Times, which is owned by Nikkei, the financial newspaper accused the company of "'free riding' on article content that journalists from both companies have spent immense time and effort to research and write," while paying no compensation. The claim also includes allegations that, in copying and storing news articles, Perplexity ignored technical safeguards like the "robots.txt" code used by websites to signal whether their data can or cannot be scraped by automated crawlers; Perplexity says it respects these request, though a 2024 report in Wired found Perplexity may have violated its pledge by using undisclosed IP addresses to access content from sites that had opted out of being scraped. The crawling issue has also caused friction between Cloudflare and Perplexity. The cybersecurity company has also alleged that Perplexity is bypassing websites' no-crawling requests by disguising its identity, making it appear as though the traffic is coming from a different source. Cloudflare investigated the AI startup after customers reported that Perplexity was ignoring robots.txt directives.

Perplexity's Clash with New Publishers Continues Despite Revenue-Sharing Efforts

The lawsuit marks the latest clash between A.I. platforms and global news publishers. Perplexity AI, a startup that has previously come under fire from online publishers, is attempting to rebuild trust with media players through revenue-sharing agreements. But that effort hasn't stopped complaints about how the company surfaces content. Its latest challenge comes from Japanese media groups Nikkei and Asahi Shumbun, which today (Aug. 26) filed a joint lawsuit accusing Perplexity of copyright infringement. Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters Co-founded in 2022 by CEO Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity has quickly become a leader in A.I.-powered search and is currently valued at $18 billion. Unlike traditional search engines that return links, Perplexity responds to queries by summarizing information found online, accompanies by citations. Perplexity did not respond to Observer requests for comment on the lawsuit. Nikkei, which owns the eponymous Japanese newspaper and the Financial Times, and Asahi Shumbun claim that Perplexity has been storing and resurfacing their articles since at least June 2024, a practice the publishers describe as "free riding" on journalists' work. The lawsuit, filed in a Tokyo District Court, demands that the A.I. company delete stored articles, stop reproducing publisher content, and pay each media company 2.2 billion Japanese yen ($15 million) in damages. The suit also alleges that Perplexity ignored robot.txt safeguards implemented by the news publishers to block unauthorized crawling and sometimes presented articles alongside incorrect information, a move the publishers argue "severely damages the credibility" of their newspapers. This is not Perplexity's first clash with news publishers. Earlier this month, Yomiuri Shimbun, another major Japanese newspaper, filed its own lawsuit against the company. U.S. outlets have also raised challenges. Last year, Condé Nast, Forbes and The New York Times all threatened legal action over alleged copyright infringement. Perplexity is currently battling a 2024 lawsuit from Dow Jones and The New York Post -- both owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp -- claiming that the startup misused content to train A.I. models. A court recently rejected Perplexity's bid to dismiss that case. Perplexity has since tried to ease tensions by launching revenue-sharing programs that give outlets a portion of the ad revenue generated from their material. The program has attracted partners such as Time Magazine, Fortune and the German news site Der Spiegel. Perplexity also recently unveiled plans to give publishers around 80 percent of the sales from Comet Plus, a news service expected to launch later this year. For now, the media industry remains divided on how to handle the rise of A.I. Some, like the Associated Press, Vox Media and The Atlantic, have signed licensing deals with OpenAI. Others remain wary. The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over unauthorized use of its content, while Canadian startup Cohere was hit with a similar lawsuit this year from more than a dozen news publishers. Thompson Reuters has also accused A.I. platform Ross Intelligence of copyright infringement in a case that dates back to 2020.

Jeff Bezos-Backed Perplexity AI Faces Lawsuit In Japan As Media Giants Nikkei, Asahi Claim AI Platform Illegally Stored, Misused Articles - Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG), Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)

Japanese media giants Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun have filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, which is backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Nvidia Corporation NVDA. They accused the AI search startup of copying and storing their content without permission. Nikkei And Asahi Seek $30 Million In Damages The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Tokyo, alleges that Perplexity scraped and retained articles from both outlets' servers despite technical measures meant to block such activity, reported the Financial Times. The publishers claim Perplexity's platform has attributed inaccurate information to their reporting, damaging their credibility and undermining journalism's value. "Perplexity's actions amount to large-scale, ongoing 'free riding' on article content that journalists have spent immense time and effort to research and write," Nikkei said in a statement. The two companies are demanding ¥2.2 billion ($15 million) each in damages and are asking Perplexity to delete all copies of their content from its systems, the report said. Perplexity did not immediately respond to Benzinga's request for comments. See Also: American Airlines CFO Declares Worst Is Over, But Cautious Outlook Sinks Stock Rising Legal Pressure On AI Startups The suit adds Japan to a growing list of countries where news organizations are challenging AI firms over content use. The Yomiuri Shimbun filed a similar complaint earlier this year, while outlets like the New York Times, BBC and Condé Nast have issued cease-and-desist letters to AI companies. In the U.S., Dow Jones and the New York Post are suing Perplexity, alleging it redirects readers away from their sites. Perplexity has also introduced revenue-sharing deals with publishers such as Time, Fortune and Der Spiegel to compensate them when their content is cited, the report noted. Perplexity's Explosive Growth And Big Ambitions Perplexity has surged to over 30 million users and grown annual recurring revenue from $35 million in mid-2024 to $150 million in 2025. The company earlier this month made headlines with a $34.5 billion cash bid for Alphabet Inc.'s GOOG GOOGL Google Chrome, one of the world's most widely used browsers. Read Next: Cathie Wood Dumps Palantir As Stock Touches Peak Prices, Bails On Soaring Flying-Taxi Maker Archer Aviation Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Photo courtesy: Shutterstock GOOGAlphabet Inc$208.60-0.27%Stock Score Locked: Edge Members Only Benzinga Rankings give you vital metrics on any stock - anytime. Unlock RankingsEdge RankingsMomentum75.17Growth78.13Quality80.61Value50.52Price TrendShortMediumLongOverviewGOOGLAlphabet Inc$207.85-0.31%NVDANVIDIA Corp$180.120.17%Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun sue Perplexity AI over alleged copyright violations

Nikkei and the Asahi Shimbun have sued artificial-intelligence startup Perplexity AI over alleged copyright infringement, joining other news organizations in Japan and the U.S. that are challenging the use of their content in AI tools. The newspapers are seeking an injunction and ¥2.2 billion ($15 million) each in damages from Perplexity, they said in a joint statement Tuesday. The suit was filed at the Tokyo District Court. The legal action by the Nikkei, which owns Japan's biggest financial newspaper, and the left-leaning Asahi underscores a widening rift between publishers and AI companies over who controls -- and profits from -- the distribution of news. The media industry argues that AI tools using their work without licenses siphons away readership and ad revenue, threatening already fragile business models. "These actions amount to continuous and large-scale freeloading on journalists' time and effort," Nikkei and Asahi said in the statement. "If left unchecked, this could undermine all media outlets trying to accurately report the facts and ultimately shake the very foundations of democracy." Courts in Japan, the U.S. and Europe are now emerging as key battlegrounds that could set precedents for how copyright law applies to generative AI. Perplexity, based in San Francisco, has also been targeted by Forbes, News Corp.'s Dow Jones and the Yomiuri Shimbun. Perplexity, which fetched a $18 billion value at its last fundraising, reproduced and saved content from the Nikkei and the Asahi since at least June last year, the newspapers said. The startup's AI search results ignored coding that indicated content was off-limits and also inserted errors that were attributed to the news organizations, damaging the papers' reputations, they said.

Perplexity Accused of Copyright Infringement by Japanese News Groups | PYMNTS.com

The companies alleged that Perplexity has, without their consent, "copied and stored article content from the servers of Nikkei and Asahi" and ignored a "technical measure" created to keep this from happening, according to the report. The companies also claimed Perplexity's answers have provided inaccurate information attributed to the newspapers' articles, which "severely damages the credibility of newspaper companies," the report said. The publishers are seeking damages of 2.2 billion yen (about $15 million) and ask that Perplexity delete the stored articles. "Perplexity's actions amount to large-scale, ongoing 'free riding' on article content that journalists from both companies have spent immense time and effort to research and write, while Perplexity pays no compensation," Nikkei, which owns the FT, said in the report. "If left unchecked, this situation could undermine the foundation of journalism, which is committed to conveying facts accurately," the companies added, per the report. Perplexity did not reply to PYMNTS' request for comment. The Japanese lawsuits came one day after Perplexity announced Comet Plus, a subscription service designed to help fund a revenue sharing program that compensates publishers when their material is used by its Comet browser or AI assistant. "Comet Plus transforms how publishers are compensated in the AI age," the company said in a blog post. "As users demand a better internet in the age of AI, it's time for a business model to ensure that publishers and journalists benefit from their contributions to a better internet." Last year, Perplexity faced copyright infringement-related legal challenges from News Corp, owner of the New York Post and Dow Jones. In June, the BBC threatened legal action against the company over its use of the broadcaster's content. As with the lawsuit in Japan, the BBC alleged that Perplexity's responses contained incorrect information, offering inaccuracies or missing context 17% of the time. Perplexity responded by saying the BBC's claims were "manipulative and opportunistic."