Perplexity AI Defends Against News Corp's Copyright Lawsuit, Highlighting AI-Media Tensions

Perplexity AI decries News Corp's 'simply false' data claims

'They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations' Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI has hit back at a lawsuit claiming that it's unfairly harvesting data from Dow Jones & Co and the New York Post to feed its AI engine, as well as stealing and mangling content. At the start of the week, News Corp took legal action on behalf of its publications, claiming in court documents [PDF] that Perplexity was posting whole chunks of the newspaper's articles, wrongly attributing facts to the sources, and that Perplexity ignored them when the issue was raised. News Corp wants $150,000 for every proven infringement. But the News Corp filing contains "falsehoods," according to Perplexity. "The suggestion that we never responded to outreach from News Corp is simply false: they reached out; we responded the very same day; instead of continuing the dialogue, they filed this lawsuit," Perplexity said in a sharply worded blog post. Secondly, the startup denies claims that Perplexity's engine merely regurgitates text. The team asserts that where excerpts from articles can be linked, the AI engine provides those links. "We have learned in the short time since this lawsuit was filed, a disturbing trend in these types of cases: The companies that are suing make all kinds of salacious allegations in their complaints about all kinds of seemingly bad things they were able to coax the AI tools to do -- and then, when pressed in the litigation for details of things like how they achieved such obviously unrepresentative results, they immediately disavow the very examples they put in the public record, and swear they won't actually use them in the case," it said. "We presume that is what will happen here. And that will tell you everything you need to know about the strength of their case." The Perplexity crew points out that it already has content-sharing deals in place with Time, Fortune, and Der Spiegel, and would have been happy to work with News Corp on a similar deal. Rather cheekily, they also point out that the Wall Street Journal, another News Corp publication, voted them the best AI chatbot earlier this year. "There are around three dozen lawsuits by media companies against generative AI tools," the AI startup notes. "The common theme betrayed by those complaints collectively is that they wish this technology didn't exist. They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll." News Corp declined to comment on Perplexity's claims. ®

'They wish this technology didn't exist': Perplexity responds to News Corp's lawsuit | TechCrunch

Perplexity shot back at media companies skeptical of AI's benefits in a blog post Thursday responding to News Corp's lawsuit filed against the startup earlier this week. The lawsuit alleged Perplexity engaged in large-scale copyright violations against Dow Jones and the NY Post, which joined several other media organizations - including Forbes, The New York Times, and Wired - which have made similar accusations against Perplexity. "There are around three dozen lawsuits by media companies against generative AI tools. The common theme betrayed by those complaints collectively is that they wish this technology didn't exist," said the Perplexity Team in the blog. "They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll." In just over 600 words, Perplexity makes several grandiose claims about the media industry as a whole -- but did little to back up those claims with facts or evidence here, saying "this is not the place to get into the weeds of it all." That said, the overall tone represents a sharp change from how Perplexity has previously engaged with the media companies that power its AI search engine. In the post, Perplexity referenced an adversarial posture between the media and tech, calling this lawsuit "fundamentally shortsighted, unnecessary, and self defeating." Throughout the blog, Perplexity does not mention or address the central claim of the lawsuit: that Perplexity allegedly copies content at a massive scale from publishers, then competes with them for the same audience. Perplexity instead asserts that media companies like News Corp wish AI tools didn't exist, a claim that's very hard to justify. News Corp is one of many media companies that has a multi-year partnership with OpenAI to display the work of its journalists within ChatGPT. Perplexity itself also works with several legacy media companies - including Time, Fortune, and Der Spiegel - in a revenue share program. The facts suggest that many media companies simply don't like the deal Perplexity (and other AI companies) are offering. Later on, the startup focuses on other claims mentioned in the lawsuit. The first point is that News Corp is misleading people by saying Perplexity regurgitates the full text of articles. Perplexity also says they responded to outreach from News Corp, even though the lawsuit alleges the startup didn't. Another point here is completely speculative: Perplexity suspects that News Corp won't actually use the "salacious" examples cited in its complaint in the real case, suggesting these examples are somehow invalid. Obviously, we'll have to wait until the case proceeds to see if that's true. While Perplexity's public response is largely deflective, their court filings may paint a different, and more detailed, picture of the events and trends at play here.

Perplexity blasts media as 'adversarial' in response to copyright lawsuit

The New York Times warns AI search engine Perplexity to stop using its content Perplexity thinks that the lawsuit "reflects an adversarial posture between media and tech that is -- while depressingly familiar -- fundamentally shortsighted, unnecessary, and self-defeating." The company says there are "countless things we would love to do beyond what the default application of law allows," and it points to its revenue-sharing program it has launched in partnership with publications like Time, Der Spiegel, and Fortune as something that it's proud of. It also says the facts alleged in News Corp's lawsuit are "misleading at best."

News Corp sues AI search engine Perplexity for copyright violation

Disclaimer: This content generated by AI & may have errors or hallucinations. Edit before use. Read our Terms of use News Corporation, the parent company of publications like The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Perplexity AI for partial verbatim reproductions of protected news content. Filed in the Southern District Court of New York, US, the complaint seeks statutory damages amounting to up to $150,000 per work infringement, actual damages, and Perplexity's profits for each infringement. Aside from copyright issues, News Corporation also accused Perplexity of hurting its publications' brand by "falsely attributing" to them content that the publications never wrote or published. The lawsuit is one of several accusations by news outlets and websites against Perplexity for illegally scraping their data. Perplexity is an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search engine that uses predictive text to address user queries. According to its website, Perplexity AI allows users to "skip the links" to original publishers' websites. Delete all news content sourced from News Corp: In its complaint, News Corp informed that it wrote to Perplexity in July 2024 regarding legal issues raised by Perplexity's unauthorized use of copyrighted works. It offered to discuss a potential licensing deal with the AI platform. "Perplexity did not bother to respond," said News Corp. It asked the court to prohibit Perplexity from using copyrighted news content without permission. It also requested the removal of news content sourced from its publications from Perplexity's indices, databases, and tools, as well as from any third-party systems. If the information cannot be permanently deleted, News Corp urged the destruction of the relevant databases and copies. Perplexity used copyrighted work for RAG index and AI outputs: News Corp alleged that Perplexity used web crawlers to access copyrighted news articles and input them into databases for its AI framework called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Following this, the copyrighted information is used to produce outputs, or "answers" to users' queries. "As Perplexity has acknowledged, and even boasted, these outputs are intended and designed to eliminate the need for Perplexity's users to go to original content creators' websites... Every instance in which Perplexity, on its own or by directing or controlling a third party, copies Plaintiffs' protected work in the process of generating user outputs, constitutes a separate violation of the [US] Copyright Act... As a direct and proximate result of Perplexity's infringements, Plaintiffs have sustained and will continue to sustain substantial, immediate and irreparable injury for which there is no adequate remedy at law," said News Corp in its complaint. False attribution to publications: News Corp claimed that Perplexity's AI chatbot misrepresented news content and falsely attributed patently erroneous statements to News Corp's trademarked publications. It further alleged that the AI company is aware of this error but still continues with this practice. "Perplexity, in connection with its AI applications, has used and, upon information and belief, continues to use in interstate commerce "The Wall Street Journal," "WSJ," "New York Post," and other marks similar and/or identical to Dow Jones's and NYP Holdings' well-known and famous trademarks in a misleading manner, falsely attributing content to Plaintiffs' trademarked publications," said News Corp. Copyright's relevance in the age of AI: The latter argument in this case, particularly highlights why it is important to work out the ambiguities in copyright law. In February, Pravin Anand, Managing Partner at Anand and Anand, spoke at FICCI Frames 2024 about how identifying the creator of a work is important in copyright law not just because of authorship, but also because it helps with the transfer of rights or resolution of liabilities. "A machine cannot transfer rights or be held liable. This issue [Gen AI and copyright] should be considered with this in mind," Anand had said at the time. Going by this logic, even if Perplexity's AI chatbot does generate incorrect information, the company would not be held liable for the same. On the other hand, by attributing misleading information to a publication, the concerned organisation may be held liable. Perplexity's repeated clashes with news publications Earlier this month, The New York Times (NYT) issued a "cease and desist" notice to Perplexity, demanding the company stop using its content for generative AI purposes. NYT also asked Perplexity to clarify how it accesses the NYT website, especially considering it had previously assured the publisher that it would cease using "crawling" technology. Perplexity responded by stating that the company was indexing web pages and surfacing factual content as citations to inform user responses. In June, a WIRED investigation uncovered similar potential issues with Perplexity AI, alleging the company's attempts to access websites that have blocked it. Like News Corp, WIRED also observed instances of Perplexity's chatbot producing inaccurate summaries of articles and generating false information, including fabricated quotes and events.

Perplexity Says Will Defend Itself in the Dow Jones, New York Post Lawsuit

(Reuters) - Perplexity said on Thursday the allegations of copyright infringement in a lawsuit filed by Dow Jones and the New York Post were misleading, and vowed to defend itself. The media conglomerate News Corp-owned publishers sued California-based Perplexity on Monday, claiming that the startup engages in a "massive amount of illegal copying" of their copyrighted work. The lawsuit says that Perplexity did not respond to a letter sent by the two news publishers in July, notifying it of the legal issues raised by its unauthorized use of copyrighted works, and offering to discuss a potential licensing deal. Perplexity denied this in a blog post on Thursday, saying that it responded to the letter the very same day and "instead of continuing the dialogue, they filed this lawsuit." Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity's CEO, was "surprised" by the lawsuit from media baron Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones and the New York Post against the search startup, he said at the WSJ Tech Live conference on Wednesday. The lawsuit is the latest salvo in a bitter ongoing battle between publishers and tech companies over unauthorized use of copyrighted content to build and operate their AI systems. The AI company is among the leading startups attempting to uproot the search engine market dominated by Alphabet's Google. It assembles information from webpages it deems to be authoritative, then provides a summary directly within Perplexity's own tool. (Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Alan Barona)

Murdoch Papers Sue AI Developer Perplexity for 'Freeriding' Their Content

Two flagship papers in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. media group filed suit against Perplexity in New York Monday, arguing the company's rampant use of their content constitutes flagrant violation of copyright law. The case, lodged jointly by Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones and the daily tabloid New York Post, accuses the the AI company of both developing its "answer machine" product, and providing responses to user queries with articles that are neither credited nor paid for. The litigation seeks to force the Jeff Bezos-backed developer Perplexity to stop further inclusion of their copyrighted material, and to destroy all existing databases containing it. But the objective behind the legal offensive isn't simply to prevent Perplexity from using protected content to train its "answer machine" to fetch accurate and vetted information in response to user queries. It also aims to halt the AI company's method of presenting those replies, which lawyers say dissuades people from visiting Journal and Post sites themselves. That, they claim, robs the publications of potential purchases of articles that Perplexity responses are built from. "This suit is brought by news publishers who seek redress for Perplexity's brazen scheme to compete for readers while simultaneously freeriding on the valuable content the publishers produce," the complaint said, according to the Journal's report on it.

Perplexity says will defend itself in the Dow Jones, New York Post lawsuit

(Reuters) - Perplexity said on Thursday the allegations of copyright infringement in a lawsuit filed by Dow Jones and the New York Post were misleading, and vowed to defend itself. The media conglomerate News Corp-owned publishers sued California-based Perplexity on Monday, claiming that the startup engages in a "massive amount of illegal copying" of their copyrighted work. The lawsuit says that Perplexity did not respond to a letter sent by the two news publishers in July, notifying it of the legal issues raised by its unauthorized use of copyrighted works, and offering to discuss a potential licensing deal. Perplexity denied this in a blog post on Thursday, saying that it responded to the letter the very same day and "instead of continuing the dialogue, they filed this lawsuit." Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity's CEO, was "surprised" by the lawsuit from media baron Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones and the New York Post against the search startup, he said at the WSJ Tech Live conference on Wednesday. The lawsuit is the latest salvo in a bitter ongoing battle between publishers and tech companies over unauthorized use of copyrighted content to build and operate their AI systems. The AI company is among the leading startups attempting to uproot the search engine market dominated by Alphabet's Google. It assembles information from webpages it deems to be authoritative, then provides a summary directly within Perplexity's own tool. (Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Alan Barona)

Wall Street Journal, NY Post sue AI startup

Media conglomerate News Corp, the conglomerate that owns the Wall Street Journal, New York Post and a number of other media properties, is suing artificial intelligence (AI) startup Perplexity over what it alleges is copyright infringement. The company's suit, filed in New York's Southern District this week, alleges Perplexity is illegally using the company's copyrighted news content to feed search queries for its artificial intelligence software. "This suit is brought by news publishers who seek redress for Perplexity's brazen scheme to compete for readers while simultaneously freeriding on the valuable content the publishers produce," the company said in the complaint, according to the Journal. Perplexity AI has raised tens of millions of dollars with the goal of competing with Google in the search business. Over the summer, the company faced backlash after it published a summarized news story with information and similar wording to a Forbes investigative story but without citing the media outlet or asking for its permission, The Associated Press reported. NewsCorp. earlier this year struck a deal with OpenAI to license its content for use in ChatGPT, another leading chatbot. Perplexity did not immediately respond to The Hill's request for comment on NewsCorp's suit.

Dow Jones, New York Post Sue Perplexity AI for Copyright Infringement: Report

Perplexity is reportedly seeking to raise USD 500 million at a USD 9 billion valuation. American publishing firm Dow Jones, the parent company of media outlets like The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, is suing the AI search engine Perplexity for copyright infringement. In a lawsuit filed on Monday, News Corp-owned companies allege that Perplexity engages in "a massive amount of illegal copying" of its copyrighted content, according to a Reuters report. Also Read: Perplexity AI Plans to Raise USD 500 Million in Funding at USD 9 Billion Valuation: Report Perplexity is an AI startup that trains its AI search models using content from across the web, allowing it to respond to user queries with summaries of its sources. Perplexity employs a variety of large language models (LLMs), including those from OpenAI and Meta's open-source model Llama, to generate these summaries. Although Perplexity provides citations in its results, its marketing promotes the idea that its interface enables users to "skip the links." "This suit is brought by news publishers who seek redress for Perplexity's brazen scheme to compete for readers while simultaneously free riding on the valuable content the publishers produce," according to the lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York by Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones and the NY Post, the report said. The news organisations reportedly allege that Perplexity's AI-generated "answer machine" has ingested their copyrighted news stories, analysis, and opinion pieces into an internal database used to generate responses to users' questions. In its quest to provide answers, Perplexity copied "vast" quantities of the publishers' work into a database, which uses an AI technique known as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to provide answers to users' queries, the suit alleges, the report said. "Perplexity perpetrates an abuse of intellectual property that harms journalists, writers, publishers, and News Corp," said News Corp CEO Robert Thomson in a statement, according to the report. In July, Dow Jones and the New York Post sent a letter to Perplexity, notifying the company of legal concerns over the unauthorised use of copyrighted material and proposing a discussion about a potential licensing agreement. However, the company did not respond, according to the lawsuit, the report added. The news organisations are reportedly asking the court to prohibit Perplexity from using their articles to generate answers and to order the destruction of any database containing their copyrighted content. Earlier this month, on October 16, The New York Times sent Perplexity a "cease and desist" notice, demanding that it stop using the newspaper's content for generative AI purposes. Earlier, in May, News Corp announced a multi-year partnership with OpenAI, with Thomson applauding the tech company for understanding "that integrity and creativity are essential" to realise the potential of artificial intelligence, the report said. Also Read: OpenAI's Content Partnerships with Media So Far in 2024 Recently, Wayra, the corporate venture capital arm of Spain-based telecommunications company Telefonica, announced that it had invested an undisclosed sum in Perplexity. According to reports, Perplexity AI is currently seeking to raise around USD 500 million at a valuation of approximately USD 9 billion.

Perplexity CEO Speaks at News Corp. Event Days After Lawsuit: "Let's Talk About the Elephant in the Room"

Ted Sarandos Talks Disney Succession, Gen AI and Live Events Push On Monday, News Corp. filed a lawsuit against the artificial intelligence firm Perplexity, arguing that the AI-generated search company infringed on its copyrights by ingesting its work and repackaging it to its users. On Wednesday, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas appeared at a News Corp. conference, where he sought to address "the elephant in the room" right at the top of his conversation. Srinivas was interviewed at the WSJ Tech conference, which is hosted by News Corp.'s flagship publication The Wall Street Journal. "They're not the only publishers like that are worried about the AI products that are surfacing their content on their answers," Srinivas said of the Journal. "I would say that they reached out around June to talk to us, and we responded to them and said we are also open to talking to them, and are interested in a proper commercial discussion on how to use the content in the Wall Street Journal and other similar outlets owned by them. So we certainly were very surprised about the lawsuit, because we actually wanted a conversation," he added. Srinivas compared his company to Spotify, the music streaming service that helped transform the business model of music, which had seen declining revenues and influence from labels, until the streaming boom brought it back from the brink and into an era of growth. "The whole point I'm here is like to make it very clear that I would love to have a commercial contract. And regardless of Wall Street Journal alone, we have a select publisher program that we announced months ago where we clearly said we're going to do advertising on Perplexity, and whenever we make advertising revenue, we're going to share that revenue with the content publishers in a manner inspired by Spotify, where the creators are still getting paid as long as Spotify keeps growing," he said, adding that "I'm hopeful that we can figure something out here." Perplexity fashions itself as an upstart competitor to Google, helping users ask questions to get answers. But while Google (at least originally) served users by giving them links to other websites, Perplexity consumes a vast array of content and condenses it to deliver an answer. It includes citations, but many of the concerns from publishers is that it obviates the need for the user to visit the source material. In the case of News Corp., the media giant argued that not only in some cases did Perplexity use some paragraphs word for word, but it also hallucinated some things, but cited its outlets. "We try our best to post-train these models to make sure it's not like regurgitating content, but it's just trying to take multiple different sources and give a diverse perspective," Srinivas said. "AIs are not perfect, we're still working with a piece of technology that is constantly improving." "Whatever issues exist today are new set of issues that did not exist one year ago or two years ago. Similarly, hallucinations is another problem where media outlets are not happy if they're cited in an answer that might be inaccurate, which is completely reasonable to want," he added. "We are trying our best to be the most accurate chatbot on the market by trying to constantly ground our answers in sources and every single day, all the people in the company are constantly tracking all the inaccurate answers and constantly thinking of ways to address them. So we are doing our best to make sure that like the product keeps improving." For now, Perplexity is still raising cash, seeking to value itself at around $9 billion in its latest round. Srinivas told the conference that he hopes the company will be profitable in three to five years, though the uncertain legal landscape around generative AI is sure to play a role in that outlook.

News Corp-Owned Publishers File Copyright Infringement Suit Against Perplexity | PYMNTS.com

The publishers allege that the AI startup uses their copyrighted content to answer users' questions, in some cases reproducing entire articles, and takes traffic that would otherwise have gone to the publishers' sites, the WSJ reported Monday (Oct. 21). "This suit is brought by news publishers who seek redress for Perplexity's brazen scheme to compete for readers while simultaneously freeriding on the valuable content publishers produce," the publishers said in their complaint, per the report. The publishers' suit comes after Perplexity did not respond to a letter they sent in July that outlined their concerns and suggested a possible licensing deal, according to the report. Perplexity did not immediately reply to PYMNTS' request for comment. It was reported in August that Perplexity has faced controversy about how it sources its content, with reports by Forbes and Wired finding evidence that it plagiarized its stories. Perplexity has since changed the way its Pages feature cites sources and made updates to properly cite sources in the copy it generates. It was reported Sunday (Oct. 20) that Perplexity is looking to raise about $500 million in a new funding round that would value it at $8 billion. The reported potential funding round would be its fourth in a year and would more than double its valuation. AI infringement issues are escalating as companies increasingly use copyrighted materials to train sophisticated algorithms without the creators' consent, PYMNTS reported in March. Experts say the problem underscores the urgent need for clearer guidelines and protections in the rapidly advancing field of AI. In some cases, AI companies and publishers have signed licensing deals.

Perplexity faces claims of massive copyright violation | Digital Trends

Perplexity bills itself as an AI-empowered direct alternative to Google. Whereas Google operates a search engine, Perplexity aims to operate an AI answer engine that allows users to "ask any question." It then "searches the internet to give you an accessible, conversational, and verifiable answer," per the company FAQ. If that sounds like an AI-enhanced version of search, you'd be right. Recommended Videos There's no question that it's been an unabashed hit since its launch in 2022. But it now finds itself facing litigation. News Corp has officially filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI over accusations that the startup has committed copyright infringement on a "massive scale." The suit, filed Monday, alleges that Perplexity lifted news, opinions and analysis directly from its Wall Street Journal and New York Post publications. This isn't the first time the AI app has been under fire for its business practices, and it's likely not going to be the last. A new kind of search Perplexity doesn't use a proprietary AI, as Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google do. Those models have their own legal troubles, but Perplexity is different in that it relies on open-source and commercially available models to process the information it scrapes from the public web. Perplexity's value proposition is instead to insert itself between search and content producers as a middleman, training its AI on copyrighted content that its chatbot will then regurgitate (oftentimes verbatim, according to the lawsuit) to its own paying customers, without compensating or attributing the original content producers. Its summaries effectively enable users to "skip the links" that Google Search provides and access high-quality information directly through its chatbot. And therein lies the problem. At least in theory, Google Search and news sites have had a symbiotic (if tenuous) relationship with Google earning ad revenue from its search results while driving traffic to the sites. Publishers of content earn revenue through ads placed on the post page itself, resulting in both sides getting paid, traffic flowing freely to independent sites, and few paywalls to get in the way. That might sound like a harmonious alliance than it really is, especially considering a recent ruling by the Department of Justice. But it's the system that has led to the internet we all enjoy today. Perplexity is something new. By its nature as an answer engine, Perplexity does not drive click traffic to independent sites. It's not hard to see why a company like News Corp could see Perplexity as a true enemy of its operations. The argument hinges on far more than just dealing with some new competition, though. Perplexity's history of sticky-fingered behavior The company has already come under fire from publishers and content creators multiple times in 2024 alone. In June, for example, Forbes chief content officer Randall Lane accused Perplexity of "willful infringement" of Forbes' reporting. According to Lane, the chatbot tried to lend credence to the story it presented by citing other reports, which ended up being just aggregated stories covering the original Forbes' post. That is, if the New York Times publishes a post and The Verge and TechCrunch and Digital Trends all cover it, Perplexity's AI would cite all those individual posts as citations for the NYT piece, which is not how citation works. What's more, the AI then sent a push notification to its subscribers imploring them to read its regurgitated report, along with an AI-generated podcast and YouTube video about it. Lane noted that the video "outranks all Forbes content on this topic within Google search." Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas responded on Twitter that "we agree with the feedback you've shared that it should be a lot easier to find the contributing sources and highlight them more prominently." Forbes also claims that Perplexity helped itself to an exclusive (and paywalled) story about ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt's efforts to build militarized drones. Perplexity's summary reportedly lifted entire passages verbatim and was subsequently viewed more than 30,000 times. "Our reporting on Eric Schmidt's stealth drone project was posted this AM by @perplexity_ai," Forbes Executive Editor John Paczkowski wrote on X. "It rips off most of our reporting. It cites us, and a few that reblogged us, as sources in the most easily ignored way possible." https://twitter.com/JohnPaczkowski/status/1799135156051255799 In July, Conde Nast sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity, again accusing it of lifting content from The New Yorker, Vogue, and Wired -- the latter of which published its own damning report on Perplexity's actions. "According to server logs, that same IP [believed to belong to Perplexity's web crawler] visited properties belonging to Condé Nast, the media company that owns Wired, at least 822 times in the past three months," Tim Marchman wrote for Wired. He notes that figure is "likely a significant undercount, because the company retains only a small portion of its records." The New York Times went on to send a cease and desist letter of its own to Perplexity in October. The publication claims that the startup's actions in scraping and summarizing its stories violate copyright law. The letter demands that Perplexity "immediately cease and desist all current and future unauthorized access and use of The Times's content." Too little, too late? Don't expect Perplexity's legal troubles to diminish any time soon. Even with general decline of online journalism in recent decades, there is still way too much money to be made by industry heavyweights at Condé Nast and New Corps to simply roll over. News Corp's lawsuit also alleges that Perplexity routinely hallucinated and misrepresented facts in its answers, "sometimes citing an incorrect source, and other times simply inventing and attributing to Plaintiffs fabricated news stories." But time may not be on their side. Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch warned in January that, due to the enormous lead times needed to litigate AI, "many media companies will go out of business" before they see their day in court. The suit also notes that News Corp reached out to Perplexity about its behavior in July. The startup reportedly "did not bother" to respond. Meanwhile, Perplexity, which is backed by Jeff Bezos, is reportedly in talks for a $9 billion valuation in a new funding round.

Perplexity seeks news allies as it challenges Google

Perplexity AI chief Aravind Srinivas said Wednesday that he hopes to collaborate with news publishers which accuse the Google challenger of freeloading off their work. Srinivas took part in an on-stage interview at a Wall Street Journal tech conference in California just days after the news outlet and the New York Post filed a lawsuit arguing that Perplexity is guilty of massive copyright infringement and trademark violations. "We certainly were very surprised about the lawsuit, because we actually wanted a conversation," Srinivas said. "I'm here to make it very clear that I would love to have a commercial contract." Srinivas criticized Google's model of directing traffic to websites, raking in money along the way from ads or sponsored results. He laid out a vision of Perplexity artificial intelligence insightfully answering online queries, then sharing ad revenue with sources cited by the search engine in process. "We're going to do advertising on Perplexity," Srinivas said. "Whenever we make advertising revenue, we're going to share that revenue with the content publishers in a manner inspired by Spotify." Perplexity.ai is a question-answering platform known for its minimalist and conversational interface. Unlike ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity's tool provides up-to-date answers that often include links to source materials, allowing users to verify information. And unlike a classic search engine, Perplexity provides ready-made answers on its webpage, making it unnecessary for users to click through to the source website. Srinivas said he aims for money-losing Perplexity to become profitable in three to five years. "I would rather figure out a model where we can grow together, where our financial success rewards you than try to just solve my problem by licensing content and moving on," Srinivas told the Journal interviewer. A lawsuit filed Monday accuses Perplexity of "massive freeriding" on protected content that allowed the company to divert readers and revenue from the Wall Street Journal and New York Post. "I'm hopeful that we can figure something out here," Srinivas said. Similar allegations have been made by The New York Times, which has sent a cease and desist letter to Perplexity. Launched at the end of 2022, Perplexity handled about 350 million queries in September as use accelerated from the 500 million queries at the search engine during all of last year, according to its chief and co-founder. At that rate, Perplexity could be handling a half-billion search queries daily by 2026, he reasoned. "A product like ours can only succeed if there is a flourishing ecosystem of good journalism," Srinivas said. "I don't think just licensing content is the solution." Perplexity is backed by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and AI juggernaut Nvidia.

Perplexity seeks news allies as it challenges Google

Perplexity AI chief Aravind Srinivas took part in an on-stage interview at a Wall Street Journal tech conference in California just days after the news outlet and the New York Post filed a lawsuit arguing that Perplexity is guilty of massive copyright infringement and trademark violations.Perplexity AI chief Aravind Srinivas said Wednesday that he hopes to collaborate with news publishers which accuse the Google challenger of freeloading off their work. Srinivas took part in an on-stage interview at a Wall Street Journal tech conference in California just days after the news outlet and the New York Post filed a lawsuit arguing that Perplexity is guilty of massive copyright infringement and trademark violations. "We certainly were very surprised about the lawsuit, because we actually wanted a conversation," Srinivas said. "I'm here to make it very clear that I would love to have a commercial contract." Srinivas criticized Google's model of directing traffic to websites, raking in money along the way from ads or sponsored results. He laid out a vision of Perplexity artificial intelligence insightfully answering online queries, then sharing ad revenue with sources cited by the search engine in process. "We're going to do advertising on Perplexity," Srinivas said. "Whenever we make advertising revenue, we're going to share that revenue with the content publishers in a manner inspired by Spotify." Perplexity.ai is a question-answering platform known for its minimalist and conversational interface. Unlike ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity's tool provides up-to-date answers that often include links to source materials, allowing users to verify information. And unlike a classic search engine, Perplexity provides ready-made answers on its webpage, making it unnecessary for users to click through to the source website. Srinivas said he aims for money-losing Perplexity to become profitable in three to five years. "I would rather figure out a model where we can grow together, where our financial success rewards you than try to just solve my problem by licensing content and moving on," Srinivas told the Journal interviewer. A lawsuit filed Monday accuses Perplexity of "massive freeriding" on protected content that allowed the company to divert readers and revenue from the Wall Street Journal and New York Post. "I'm hopeful that we can figure something out here," Srinivas said. Similar allegations have been made by The New York Times, which has sent a cease and desist letter to Perplexity. Launched at the end of 2022, Perplexity handled about 350 million queries in September as use accelerated from the 500 million queries at the search engine during all of last year, according to its chief and co-founder. At that rate, Perplexity could be handling a half-billion search queries daily by 2026, he reasoned. "A product like ours can only succeed if there is a flourishing ecosystem of good journalism," Srinivas said. "I don't think just licensing content is the solution." Perplexity is backed by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and AI juggernaut Nvidia.

Perplexity seeks news allies as it challenges Google

San Francisco (AFP) - Perplexity AI chief Aravind Srinivas said Wednesday that he hopes to collaborate with news publishers which accuse the Google challenger of freeloading off their work. Srinivas took part in an on-stage interview at a Wall Street Journal tech conference in California just days after the news outlet and the New York Post filed a lawsuit arguing that Perplexity is guilty of massive copyright infringement and trademark violations. "We certainly were very surprised about the lawsuit, because we actually wanted a conversation," Srinivas said. "I'm here to make it very clear that I would love to have a commercial contract." Srinivas criticized Google's model of directing traffic to websites, raking in money along the way from ads or sponsored results. He laid out a vision of Perplexity artificial intelligence insightfully answering online queries, then sharing ad revenue with sources cited by the search engine in process. "We're going to do advertising on Perplexity," Srinivas said. "Whenever we make advertising revenue, we're going to share that revenue with the content publishers in a manner inspired by Spotify." Perplexity.ai is a question-answering platform known for its minimalist and conversational interface. Unlike ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity's tool provides up-to-date answers that often include links to source materials, allowing users to verify information. And unlike a classic search engine, Perplexity provides ready-made answers on its webpage, making it unnecessary for users to click through to the source website. Srinivas said he aims for money-losing Perplexity to become profitable in three to five years. "I would rather figure out a model where we can grow together, where our financial success rewards you than try to just solve my problem by licensing content and moving on," Srinivas told the Journal interviewer. A lawsuit filed Monday accuses Perplexity of "massive freeriding" on protected content that allowed the company to divert readers and revenue from the Wall Street Journal and New York Post. "I'm hopeful that we can figure something out here," Srinivas said. Similar allegations have been made by The New York Times, which has sent a cease and desist letter to Perplexity. Launched at the end of 2022, Perplexity handled about 350 million queries in September as use accelerated from the 500 million queries at the search engine during all of last year, according to its chief and co-founder. At that rate, Perplexity could be handling a half-billion search queries daily by 2026, he reasoned. "A product like ours can only succeed if there is a flourishing ecosystem of good journalism," Srinivas said. "I don't think just licensing content is the solution." Perplexity is backed by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and AI juggernaut Nvidia.

Perplexity Aims to Form Revenue-Sharing Partnerships With News Publishers | PYMNTS.com

Dow Jones and the Post said in their lawsuit that Perplexity had not responded to the letter, according to the report. Srinivas said Wednesday that Perplexity wants to form revenue-sharing partnerships with news publishers, per the report. He said that he is not interested in signing licensing agreements with publishers, instead suggesting that the company would share advertising revenue with publishers. Perplexity will launch an advertising program in November, according to the report. Srinivas also said that Perplexity could supply publishers with chatbots that would respond to users' queries on the publishers' websites, using their content to provide answers, per the report. "I don't think just licensing content is the only solution," Srinivas said, according to the report. "Neither am I saying our publisher program is already there. I hope that more conversations will get us there." In the copyright infringement lawsuit filed Monday, Dow Jones and the Post allege that Perplexity's AI search engine uses their copyrighted content to answer users' questions, in some cases reproducing entire articles, and takes traffic that would otherwise have gone to the publishers' sites.