New York Times and Chicago Tribune sue Perplexity over alleged copyright infringement

The New York Times is suing Perplexity for copyright infringement | TechCrunch

The New York Times filed suit Friday against AI search startup Perplexity for copyright infringement, its second lawsuit against an AI company. The Times joins several media outlets suing Perplexity, including the Chicago Tribune, which also filed suit this week. The Times's suit claims that "Perplexity provides commercial products to its own users that substitute" for the outlet, "without permission or remuneration." The lawsuit - filed even as several publishers, including The Times, negotiate deals with AI firms - is part of the same, ongoing years-long strategy. Recognizing the AI tide cannot be stopped, publishers use lawsuits as leverage in negotiations in the hopes of forcing AI companies to formally license content in ways that compensate creators and maintain the economic viability of original journalism. Perplexity tried to address compensation demands by launching a Publishers' Program last year, which offers participating outlets like Gannett, TIME, Fortune and the Los Angeles Times a share of ad revenue. In August, Perplexity also launched Comet Plus, allocating 80% of its $5 monthly fee to participating publishers, and recently struck a multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images. "While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, we firmly object to Perplexity's unlicensed use of our content to develop and promote their products," Graham James, a spokesperson for The Times, said in a statement. "We will continue to work to hold companies accountable that refuse to recognize the value of our work." Similar to the Tribune's suit, the Times takes issue with Perplexity's method for answering user queries by gathering information from websites and databases to generate responses via its retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) products, like its chatbots and Comet browser AI assistant. "Perplexity then repackages the original content in written responses to users," the suit reads. "Those responses, or outputs, often are verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, summaries, or abridgments of the original content, including The Times's copyrighted works." Or, as James put it in his statement, "RAG allows Perplexity to crawl the internet and steal content from behind our paywall and deliver it to its customers in real time. That content should only be accessible to our paying subscribers." The Times also claims Perplexity's search engine has hallucinated information and falsely attributed it to the outlet, which damages its brand. Perplexity could not be reached for comment. The lawsuit comes just over a year after The Times sent a cease and desist letter to Perplexity demanding it stop using its content for summaries and other output. The outlet claims it has contacted Perplexity several times over the past 18 months to stop using its content unless an agreement could be negotiated. This isn't the first fight The Times has picked with an AI firm. The Tims is also suing OpenAI and its backer Microsoft, claiming the two trained their AI systems with millions of the outlet's articles without offering compensation. OpenAI has argued that its use of publicly available data for AI training constitutes "fair use," and has shot its own accusations at the Times, claiming the outlet manipulated ChatGPT to find evidence. That case is still ongoing, but a similar lawsuit directed against OpenAI competitor Anthropic could set a precedent in regards to fair use for training AI systems going forward. In that suit, in which authors and publishers sued the AI firm for using pirated books to train its models, the court ruled that while lawfully acquired books might be a safe fair use application, pirated ones infringe on copyrights. Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement. The Times's lawsuit adds to mounting legal pressure on Perplexity. Last year, News Corp - which owns outlets like The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, and the New York Post - made similar claims against Perplexity. That list grew in 2025 to also include Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster, Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun, and Reddit. Other outlets, including Wired and Forbes, have accused Perplexity of plagiarism and unethically crawling and scraping content from websites that have explicitly indicated they don't want to be scraped. The latter claim is one that internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare recently confirmed. In its suit, The Times is asking the courts to make Perplexity pay for the harm allegedly caused and ban the startup from continuing to use its content. The Times is clearly not above working with AI firms that compensate for its reporters' work. The outlet earlier this year struck a multiyear deal with Amazon to license its content to train the tech giant's AI models. Several other publishers and media companies have signed licensing deals with AI firms to use their content for training and to feature in chatbot responses. OpenAI has inked deals with Associated Press, Axel Springer, Vox Media, The Atlantic, and more.

Chicago Tribune sues Perplexity | TechCrunch

The Chicago Tribune filed a lawsuit against AI search engine Perplexity on Thursday alleging copyright infringement. The suit, seen by TechCrunch, was filed in a federal court in New York. The Tribune alleges that its lawyers contacted Perplexity in mid-October asking if the AI search engine was using its content, according to the complaint. Perplexity's lawyers replied it did not train models with the Tribune's work, but that it "may receive non-verbatim factual summaries," the lawsuit claims. The Tribune's lawyers, however, argue that Perplexity is delivering Tribune content verbatim. Interestingly, the newspaper's lawyers are also calling out Perplexity's Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) as a culprit. RAG is a method used to limit hallucinations by having the model only use an accurate or verified data source. The Tribune argues that Perplexity is using the newspaper's content in its RAG systems, scraped without permission. Plus, it alleges the Perplexity's Comet browser is bypassing the paper's paywall to deliver detailed summaries of those articles. The Tribune is one of 17 news publications from MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing that sued OpenAI and Microsoft over model training material in April. That suit is ongoing. Another nine from these publishers sued the model maker and its cloud provider in November, too. While creators have filed many lawsuits against model makers over using their work for model training, we'll have to see if the courts weigh in about the legal liabilities of RAG as well. Perplexity did not immediately respond to the Chicago Tribune's story about its own lawsuit, nor to TechCrunch's request for comment. Perplexity is facing other such suits. Reddit filed one in October. Dow Jones is also suing. Last month, while Amazon didn't sue, it did threaten to by sending a cease and desist letter over AI browser shopping.

The New York Times sues Perplexity, alleging copyright infringement

The suit, filed in the Southern District of New York, accuses Perplexity of unlawfully scraping The Times' stories, videos, podcasts and other content to formulate responses to user queries. The startup also generates outputs that are "identical or substantially similar to" The Times' content, according to the complaint. "While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, we firmly object to Perplexity's unlicensed use of our content to develop and promote their products," Graham James, a spokesperson for The Times, said in a statement. "We will continue to work to hold companies accountable that refuse to recognize the value of our work." Perplexity did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.

The New York Times and Chicago Tribune sue Perplexity over alleged copyright infringement

The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune have filed separate lawsuits against Perplexity over alleged copyright infringement. The Times said it had sent Perplexity several cease-and-desist demands to stop using its content until the two reached an agreement, but the AI company persisted in doing so. In the lawsuit [PDF], the Times accused Perplexity of infringing on its copyrights at two main stages. First, by scraping its website (including in real time) to train AI models and feed content into the likes of the Claude chatbot and Comet browser. Second, in the output of Perplexity's products, with the Times accusing the company's generative AI products of often reproducing its articles verbatim. The Times also says Perplexity damaged its brand by falsely attributing completely fabricated information (aka hallucinations) to the newspaper. The Chicago Tribune also filed a lawsuit against Perplexity for similar reasons. "Perplexity's genAI products generate outputs that are identical or substantially similar to the Chicago Tribune's content," the newspaper claimed in its suit. "Upon information and belief, Perplexity has unlawfully copied millions of copyrighted Chicago Tribune stories, videos, images and other works to power its products and tools." These lawsuits are the latest in dozens of legal cases involving copyright holders and AI companies in the US. The Times, for instance, previously sued OpenAI and Microsoft. It accused the companies of training their large language models on millions of its articles without permission. That case is ongoing. Copyright holders have licensed their content to AI companies in some cases, though. OpenAI has struck multiple deals with media companies. The Times and Amazon reached an agreement this year that's said to be worth as much as $25 million per year to the media company.

New York Times Sues A.I. Start-Up Perplexity Over Use of Copyrighted Work

Cade Metz reported from San Francisco, and Michael M. Grynbaum from New York. The New York Times claimed in a lawsuit on Friday that its copyrights were repeatedly violated by Perplexity, an artificial intelligence start-up that has built a cutting-edge internet search engine. The Times said in its lawsuit that it had contacted Perplexity several times over the past 18 months, demanding that the start-up stop using the publication's content until the two companies negotiated an agreement. But Perplexity continued to use The Times's material. The suit, filed in federal court in New York, is the latest in a growing legal battle between copyright holders and A.I. companies that includes more than 40 cases around the country. In August 2024, Dow Jones, owner of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and other publications, made similar claims in another lawsuit against Perplexity. The suit is also the second that The Times has filed against A.I. companies. In December 2023, The Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft, arguing that the companies trained their A.I. systems using millions of articles published by The Times without offering compensation. Microsoft and OpenAI, the maker of the chatbot ChatGPT, have disputed the claims. Perplexity, a San Francisco company founded in 2022 by a former OpenAI engineer and other entrepreneurs, operates a search engine powered by the same type of A.I. technology that underpins ChatGPT. The suit accuses Perplexity of violating The Times's copyrights in several ways, most notably when the start-up's search engine retrieves information from a website or database and uses that information to generate a piece of text and to respond to queries from internet users. That would not be a fair use of that material, the suit claimed, because Perplexity grabbed large chunks of the publication's content -- in some cases, entire articles -- and provided information that directly competed with what The Times offered its readers. "Perplexity provides commercial products to its own users that substitute for The Times, without permission or remuneration," the suit said. The Times also accused Perplexity of damaging its brand. In some cases, the suit said, Perplexity's search engine made up information -- what A.I. researchers call "hallucination" -- and falsely attributed that information to The Times. Perplexity did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Of the more than 40 suits that have been filed by copyright holders against A.I. companies over the past four years, most are still winding their way through the courts. In September, Anthropic, an OpenAI rival, agreed to pay book authors and publishers $1.5 billion after a judge ruled that the company, which is based in San Francisco, had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books as it built its A.I. systems. In May, The Times struck a multiyear deal with Amazon to license its editorial content for use in the tech giant's artificial intelligence platforms. It was The Times's first licensing arrangement involving generative A.I. No financial terms were disclosed. Amazon will use material from The Times's food and recipe site as well as content from the publication's sports site, The Athletic, and Times material will be used to train Amazon's A.I. models. Many other news organizations have signed similar deals with A.I. companies, including OpenAI and Microsoft.

NYT sues Perplexity for copyright infringement

Why it matters: The lawsuit expands the Times' legal battles against AI companies, as it looks to set clearer boundaries and a new precedent for how it and other content companies are compensated for their work in the AI era. * The Times became one of the first major media companies to sue OpenAI and its biggest investor Microsoft in 2023 for copyright infringement. That legal battle is still playing out. Zoom in: In its complaint, the Times says Perplexity "engaged in illegal conduct that threatens" its legacy and "impedes the free press's ability to continue playing its role in supporting an informed citizenry and a healthy democracy." * The complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges Perplexity copied the Times' journalism and repackaged "near-verbatim" copies of it as its own original content to feed its suite of AI products. * The publication argues Perplexity violates its trademarks by attributing "hallucinations" or made-up responses to user queries, to the Times. Zoom out: Perplexity has faced more legal challenges from publishers over the past year than some of its generative AI peers.

New York Times sues AI startup for 'illegal' copying of millions of articles

Perplexity AI also faces lawsuit from Murdoch-owned Dow Jones and New York Post for its use of copyrighted content The New York Times sued an embattled artificial intelligence startup on Friday, accusing the firm of illegal copying of millions of articles. The newspaper alleged Perplexity AI had distributed and displayed journalists' work without permission en masse. The Times said that Perplexity AI is also violating its trademarks under the Lanham Act, claiming the startup's generative AI products create fabricated content, or "hallucinations", and falsely attribute them to the newspaper by displaying them alongside its registered trademarks. The newspaper said that Perplexity's business model relies on scraping and copying content, including paywalled material, to power its generative AI products. Other publishers have made similar allegations. The lawsuit is the latest salvo in a bitter, ongoing battle between publishers and tech companies over the use of copyrighted content without authorization to build and operate their AI systems. Perplexity in particular has become a target of multiple legal disputes and faces similar accusations from a number of publishers as it tries to aggressively build market share in a hyper-competitive market for generative AI tools. Cloudflare, one of the world's most prominent digital infrastructure companies, accused Perplexity earlier this year of hiding its web-crawling activities and scraping websites without permission - a serious accusation with potential copyright implications. Perplexity denied the allegations. Perplexity has raised around $1.5bn in the past three years through multiple funding rounds, most recently closing a $200m round in September that valued the company at $2obn. It has attracted a variety of big-name investors, including Nvidia and Jeff Bezos, as money has flooded the AI industry. San Francisco-based Perplexity AI also faced a lawsuit from media baron Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones and the New York Post. Multiple news outlets, including Forbes and Wired, have accused Perplexity of plagiarizing their content, in one case allegedly copying a Wired article about Perplexity's own plagiarism issues. The Chicago Tribune, Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Encyclopedia Britannica have all additionally filed lawsuits against Perplexity in recent months, accusing the company of copyright infringement. In October, social media company Reddit also sued Perplexity in New York federal court, accusing it and three other companies of unlawfully scraping its data to train Perplexity's AI-based search engine. Perplexity faces legal challenges from its fellow tech companies as well. Amazon last month filed a lawsuit against Perplexity over the search engine's AI agent shopping feature. The suit alleged that Perplexity was covertly accessing Amazon users' accounts and masking its AI browsing activities, which Perplexity has denied while accusing Amazon of bullying and attempting to stifle competitors. Perplexity did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

ETtech Explainer: The New York Times' copyright battle against Perplexity AI - The Economic Times

The New York Times has sued Perplexity AI, claiming the startup used millions of its articles without permission to train chatbots. The newspaper alleges copyright violations, reputational harm, and unauthorised commercial use, despite prior warnings. This dispute is part of a wider conflict between publishers and AI firms over content rights.The New York Times (NYT) has filed a lawsuit against the artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI, arguing that the company repeatedly used its content without approval. According to the NYT, Perplexity copied, displayed and distributed millions of its articles to help train and develop its chatbot systems, all without the publication's consent. The lawsuit states that over the past 18 months, the NYT contacted Perplexity several times and asked the startup to stop using its material until both sides could negotiate proper terms. Despite these approaches, the NYT says Perplexity continued to use its content. What are the accusations? In its legal suit, the NYT claims Perplexity breached its copyrights in several different ways. The main allegation is that Perplexity's search tool gathers information from websites or databases, then uses that information to respond to its users. The NYT says this is not fair use because Perplexity allegedly lifted large parts of its reporting, sometimes full articles, to produce outputs that compete directly with the newspaper's own journalism. The complaint also states that Perplexity damaged the NYT's reputation. According to the filing, Perplexity sometimes invented facts, a behaviour referred to as hallucination then wrongly attributed it to the publication. The NYT also argues that Perplexity offers paid products that effectively replace its reporting. These products use their articles without permission or payment, the lawsuit says, which allows Perplexity to benefit financially from work it does not own. In October, the NYT had sent Perplexity a 'cease and desist' notice instructing the company to stop using its content for generative AI purposes. The letter also asked Perplexity to explain how it continued accessing the NYT's site even though the publisher had put measures in place to block such activity. According to the letter, Perplexity had previously promised to stop using crawling tools. The NYT says its material still appears on the platform despite that assurance. The NYT's argument The NYT spokesperson Graham James said in a statement to Reuters: "While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, we firmly object to Perplexity's unlicensed use of our content to develop and promote their products." The publication is asking the court for damages and other legal measures to stop Perplexity from continuing what it says is unauthorised use of its content. Perplexity's take on the dispute Jesse Dwyer, head of communication at Perplexity, criticised the lawsuit and said publishers often use legal action in an attempt to slow down new technologies. "Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media and now AI," Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity's head of communication, said in a statement to the NYT. "Fortunately, it's never worked, or we'd all be talking about this by telegraph." The company has previously said that it does not scrape data to build foundation models. Instead, it says it indexes online pages and presents users with factual citations. NYT - Amazon deal While the NYT is taking legal action against Perplexity, it has embraced AI partnerships in other areas. In May, the newspaper agreed a multi-year licensing arrangement with Amazon that allows the tech company to use its journalism in its AI products. This is the NYT's first official deal related to generative AI. The financial details of the agreement were not disclosed. Also Read: The NYT paradox: Suing OpenAI, then signing with Amazon Under this partnership, Amazon will use content from the NYT's food and recipe service and its sports publication, The Athletic. The company will also use selected the NYT reporting to help train its AI models. A growing number of news organisations have reached similar agreements with major technology firms. These include deals between publishers and companies such as OpenAI and Microsoft. Setting context The legal dispute forms part of a wider and increasingly intense conflict between publishers and technology companies over copyrighted material being used without authorisation. Reuters reported last year that several AI firms were ignoring widely used technical standards designed to stop websites from being scraped for generative AI training. This new lawsuit is the second the NYT has brought against AI firms. In 2023, the publication sued OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing that both companies trained their large AI systems on millions of its articles without paying for the content. Both companies have denied the allegations. On the other hand, this is the second lawsuit against Perplexity this week. On Thursday, The Chicago Tribune filed its own copyright lawsuit accusing Perplexity of misusing its content. In October, Reddit sued Perplexity in a New York federal court, saying the company and three others scrapped its data without permission. Last year, Dow Jones, owner of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and several other titles, brought a similar case. Perplexity is also facing legal challenges from Encyclopedia Britannica. More than 40 lawsuits have been filed by copyright holders against AI companies in the last four years. Most of these cases are still ongoing. One recent exception was a ruling in September involving Anthropic, an OpenAI competitor. A judge found that the company had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books to train its models. Anthropic later agreed to pay book authors and publishers $1.5 billion.

New York Times, Chicago Tribune Sue Perplexity AI For Reproducing Their Stories

New York Times, Chicago Tribune Sue Perplexity AI For Reproducing Their Stories Perplexity AI, an artificial-intelligence-based chatbot and search engine, is up against two new lawsuits as both the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune allege the startup has been stealing their content. Both outlets allege that Perplexity has been reproducing large chunks of their stories, sometimes presenting the information inaccurately, without having negotiated an agreement with the publications to do so. Both filed in New York federal court. The lawsuits add to the broader conflict between AI companies and writers who allege the startups have been unfairly benefiting from their work by using it to train their models and diverting traffic away from the source. Dow Jones, which owns The Wall Street Journal, sued Perplexity on similar grounds last year.

New York Times sues Perplexity AI for 'illegal' copying of content

The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against AI startup Perplexity. The Times claims Perplexity copied and used its articles without permission for its AI products. This is part of a larger legal battle between publishers and AI companies. Perplexity faces similar accusations from other media outlets. The startup denies wrongdoing, calling the lawsuits an outdated tactic. The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI on Friday, claiming that the artificial intelligence startup was copying, distributing and displaying millions of its articles without permission to power its generative AI products. The startup has become a target of multiple legal disputes and faces similar accusations from a number of publishers as it tries to aggressively carve out a share of the hyper-competitive market for generative AI tools. The Times also claimed that the startup's generative AI products created fabricated content, or "hallucinations," and falsely attributed them to the newspaper by displaying them alongside its registered trademarks. It said that Perplexity's business model relied on scraping and copying content, including paywalled material. "While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, we firmly object to Perplexity's unlicensed use of our content to develop and promote their products," NYT spokesperson Graham James said in a statement. The NYT is seeking damages, injunctive relief and other equitable remedies to prevent Perplexity from continuing its alleged unauthorized use of content. Perplexity was also sued by the Chicago Tribune on Thursday. The startup's head of communication, Jesse Dwyer, dismissed the lawsuits, saying it was an unsuccessful tactic used by publishers against emerging technologies. Perplexity had previously said that it was not scraping data for building foundation models, but rather indexing web pages and providing factual citations. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, comes more than a year after the NYT sent a cease and desist notice to Perplexity. It is also the latest salvo in a bitter ongoing battle between publishers and tech companies over the use of copyrighted content without authorization. In October, social media company Reddit sued Perplexity in New York federal court, accusing it and three other companies of unlawfully scraping its data. The San Francisco-based startup, which is valued at about $20 billion, is also facing lawsuits from Encyclopedia Britannica and media baron Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones and the New York Post. The NYT, which has allowed Amazon.com to use its editorial content for AI products such as Alexa, is also tussling with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. Reuters reported last year that multiple AI companies were bypassing a web standard used by publishers to block the scraping of their data used in generative AI systems. NYT shares were up 1.8%. (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel)

New York Times Sues Perplexity, Alleging Copyright Violations and Damage to Brand | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The New York Times reported Friday (Dec. 5) that the suit accuses Perplexity of violating its copyrights by retrieving The Times' content with its AI-powered search engine and displaying large parts of that content in a way that competes with The Times. The suit also accuses Perplexity of damaging the publisher's brand by in some cases making up information and falsely attributing that information to The Times, according to the report. The New York Times contacted Perplexity several times over the past 18 months, demanding that it stop using The Times' content in its AI-powered search engine until the companies reach an agreement, per the report. Reached by PYMNTS, Perplexity Head of Communication Jesse Dwyer said in an emailed statement: "Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media and now AI. Fortunately it's never worked, or we'd all be talking about this by telegraph." According to The New York Times report, the publisher sued another AI startup, OpenAI, and its partner Microsoft in 2023, accusing them of training their AI on its content without its permission. The publisher signed the first licensing agreement allowing its content to be used for generative AI in May, the report said. The deal allows Amazon to use The Times' content in its AI platforms and to train its AI models, per the report. Social media platform Reddit sued Perplexity and three data scraping firms in October, accusing them of harvesting its content without authorization. Reddit's complaint alleges that the companies collected and resold data from the platform's discussion forms through automated tools. It was reported in August that Japanese media company Nikkei and the Asahi Shimbun newspaper filed lawsuits accusing Perplexity of copyright infringement. The companies alleged that the AI startup had, 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. The companies also claimed that Perplexity's answers had provided inaccurate information attributed to the newspapers' articles, which "severely damages the credibility of newspaper companies."

New York Times Sues Perplexity AI For Copyright Infringement

The New York Times (NYT) has filed a major lawsuit against Perplexity AI, accusing the artificial intelligence (AI) company of illegally copying its journalism and using it to power commercial AI products. The complaint, filed on December 5, 2025, in a US District Court in New York, says Perplexity has built its business by "large-scale, unlawful copying and distribution" of Times' content, harming the paper's ability to earn revenue from subscriptions, advertising, and licensing. As a result, NYT is asking for an injunction, damages, and a jury trial. According to the filing, Perplexity scrapes NYT articles from nytimes.com and obtains them from third-party databases to create a private index that feeds its retrieval-augmented generation system. This system helps Perplexity generate answers, summaries and even verbatim excerpts from NYT stories without permission. The complaint further states that Perplexity's chatbots, browser assistant and API tools often reproduce Times reporting so completely that readers no longer need to visit their website. Notably, the filing includes multiple examples in which Perplexity's products output large portions of Times articles, including paywalled content. Alleged Evasion of Blocks and Violation of Terms of Service The Times says that Perplexity's access has continued even after repeated attempts to block it. The newspaper blocked Perplexity's bots in its robots.txt file in 2024 and later placed a "hard-block" on its servers, yet the company allegedly continued trying to reach the site. The complaint cites independent research claiming that Perplexity used undeclared user agents, disguised its crawlers to look like ordinary web browsers, relied on hidden IP addresses, and used third-party crawling tools to avoid detection. The Times argues that these methods violate both copyright law and the newspaper's terms of service: which prohibit scraping, automated access and any use of its content for AI training, fine-tuning or grounding. The lawsuit also accuses Perplexity of trademark violations for attributing fabricated or incomplete information to Times brands such as The NYT, Wirecutter and The Athletic. In one example cited in the complaint, Perplexity told a user that Wirecutter had praised a product recalled for safety concerns, even though Wirecutter has never reviewed it. The Times argues that such "hallucinations", presented alongside its trademarks, mislead the public and risk harming the paper's reputation for accuracy. The complaint describes this as dilution by 'tarnishment', and says it amounts to false designation of origin. NYT Says Journalism's Business Model at Risk The Times frames the dispute as essential to the survival of high-quality journalism. It says that its reporters, editors, photographers and producers invest enormous effort and resources to create original work, including investigations that can take months and global reporting that requires bureaus around the world. The newspaper argues that Perplexity's practice of summarising or reproducing this work without payment drains the value that supports journalism. The complaint warns that if AI companies can freely take news content, the economics of journalism will collapse, ultimately harming the public's ability to access reliable information. The lawsuit places significant emphasis on Perplexity's rapid growth and large financial backing. For context, the filing notes reports that the AI company was valued at $20 billion in 2025, had raised nearly $1.5 billion in funding, served 22 million active users and handled hundreds of millions of queries each month. It also points out that Perplexity spent substantial amounts on cloud computing and licensing to access AI models of other AI companies, but "paid The Times nothing" for the journalism that allegedly powers its answer engine. The Times also cites a 2024 study finding that AI search tools send far less traffic to publishers than traditional search engines, arguing that this loss of referral traffic cuts directly into a key revenue source. Statements by Perplexity Leaders Included as Evidence The complaint incorporates public statements from Perplexity executives to argue that the company openly acknowledges relying on copyrighted reporting to deliver answers. The Times has highlighted statements from Perplexity's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Aravind Srinivas explaining that Perplexity aims to streamline search by providing full answers rather than links, and that the company's principle is to "only say what you can cite". While in another interview, Srinivas said, "You're not supposed to say anything that you don't retrieve." The Times argues that this reflects Perplexity's reliance on outside content such as reporting done by newspapers. Legal Claims and Relief Sought In its legal claims, the Times alleges direct copyright infringement for both the acquisition of its articles and the outputs generated from them. It also asserts contributory and vicarious infringement in case Perplexity argues that users, and not the AI company, are responsible for the copying done through its tools. Alongside copyright and trademark claims, the Times seeks statutory damages, actual damages, disgorgement of profits, legal fees, and a permanent injunction blocking Perplexity from accessing or using its content. Earlier Flashpoint Notably, this lawsuit did not emerge in isolation. In October 2024, NYT had sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist notice, accusing the AI startup of using Times' journalism for summaries and outputs despite being technically blocked from the site. For context, NYT asked Perplexity to explain how it continued accessing its website and said its content still appeared on the platform even after Perplexity claimed it had stopped crawling. Meanwhile, Perplexity insisted that it wasn't scraping to train AI models, but merely indexing public webpages to surface factual citations, arguing that facts themselves cannot be copyrighted. Notably, that early clash set the stage for the escalating legal confrontation now unfolding. Elsewhere, Reddit also sued Perplexity, alleging "industrial-scale" circumvention of scraping restrictions. Meanwhile, last month Amazon also filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, accusing the startup of using its Comet browser and associated AI agent to make purchases on the Amazon Store without authorisation. Furthermore, in September 2025, Encyclopaedia Britannica and its subsidiary Merriam-Webster sued Perplexity for copyright infringement. And in June this year, BBC threatened to take legal action against Perplexity for allegedly creating verbatim reproductions of BBC reports. What Comes Next Perplexity has not yet submitted its response in court. And this case joins a growing number of lawsuits against AI companies over their use of copyrighted material: a legal issue that remains unresolved at the national level. The Times argues that the stakes extend far beyond this dispute, warning that AI companies imperil the very market that they copy and reproduce from for providing users with high-quality content. "While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, we firmly object to Perplexity's unlicensed use of our content to develop and promote their products. We will continue to work to hold companies accountable that refuse to recognise the value of our work" said an NYT spokesperson. "Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media and now AI," Perplexity's Head of Communications, Jesse Dwyer said in a statement to The Times. "Fortunately, it's never worked, or we'd all be talking about this by telegraph," Dwyer added. Pertinently, this lawsuit is the Times's second major case against an AI developer. Back in 2023, the newspaper took OpenAI and its partner Microsoft to court, accusing them of using millions of NYT articles to train their AI models without paying for it. Both companies rejected the allegations.

New York Times sues Perplexity AI for 'illegal' copying of content

The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI on Friday, claiming that the artificial intelligence startup was copying, distributing and displaying millions of its articles without permission. The startup has become a target of multiple legal disputes and faces similar accusations from a number of publishers as it tries to aggressively build market share in a hyper-competitive market for generative AI tools. The Times said that Perplexity AI is also violating its trademarks under the Lanham Act, claiming the startup's generative AI products create fabricated content, or "hallucinations," and falsely attribute them to the newspaper by displaying them alongside its registered trademarks. The newspaper also said that Perplexity's business model relies on scraping and copying content, including paywalled material, to power its generative AI products. The lawsuit is the latest salvo in a bitter ongoing battle between publishers and tech companies over the use of copyrighted content without authorization to build and operate their AI systems. In October, social media company Reddit RDDT.Nsued Perplexity in New York federal court,accusing it and three other companies of unlawfully scraping its data to train Perplexity's AI-based search engine. San Francisco-based Perplexity is also facing a lawsuit from media baron Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones and the New York Post. Perplexity did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.