AI search startup Perplexity is facing a new copyright lawsuit.
The New York Times has announced that it will sue Perplexity for copying and distributing its journalism without permission.
Perplexity reproduced the articles “exactly or nearly verbatim,” threatening the newspaper's subscription and licensing revenue, according to the complaint.
Perplexity's use of copyrighted material has been questioned before. Forbes and Wired accused the company of pulling material from the site while bypassing tools meant to block unauthorized scraping. These publishers said Perplexity's crawlers repackage premium stories within their responses.
Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post are also suing Perplexity, alleging copyright infringement.
Perplexity did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment. “Since our founding, Perplexity has always listed sources above our answers and provided inline citations for every part of our answers,” the company wrote in a blog post last year. He also said, “Tools like Perplexity offer fundamentally transformative ways for people to learn facts about the world.”
Social media giant Reddit is also eyeing Perplexity. The company said in an October lawsuit that Perplexity built a multibillion-dollar business by harvesting content through search engine caches to circumvent technical failures. Reddit claimed that this tactic allowed Perplexity to avoid payroll and access controls.
The Times' lawsuit against Perplexity comes amid ongoing litigation against OpenAI. In the dispute, a federal judge ordered OpenAI to hand over 20 million anonymized ChatGPT logs so the Times could see whether its stories appeared in the model output.
Earlier this year, a group of media companies, including Business Insider's parent company Axel Springer, filed a lawsuit against Cohere, an AI company that builds large-scale language models for enterprises. Media companies accused Cohere of repurposing content without permission.
Kohia said the lawsuit is “misguided” and that “the allegations demonstrate a lack of understanding of Kohia's business and the use of its technology.”
Correction, December 5, 2025 — This article has been updated to correct reference to the New York Times lawsuit against Perplexity. Perplexity reproduced the Times' content “exactly or nearly verbatim,” according to the complaint.
This article was written using Business Insider's AI tools and edited by Business Insider editors.
