The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Perplexity on Friday (Dec. 5). The publication claimed that the artificial intelligence (AI) startup repeatedly infringed its copyrights. In a lawsuit filed in federal court in New York, the newspaper alleges it contacted Perplexity multiple times over the past 18 months to request that the AI company known for its cutting-edge search engine stop using Times material until a licensing agreement could be negotiated. However, Perplexity continued to use the content without permission or compensation, the complaint states.“Perplexity offers its users a commercial alternative to The Times without permission or compensation,” the complaint alleges.
What the New York Times lawsuit says about Perplexity
The lawsuit accuses Perplexity of infringing copyright primarily through its search engine, which uses information obtained from the Times’ digital platforms to generate direct responses to users’ queries. It further alleges that because Perplexity acquired much of the publication’s content and provided information that directly competes with the Times’ own offerings, its distribution of this content constitutes an unfair use of copyrighted material. In some cases, entire articles were presented to users, according to the lawsuit. Additionally, the Times accused the AI startup of damaging its brand by sometimes creating fabricated information and falsely attributing that fabricated content to The New York Times.
Newest AI company Perplexity hits lawsuit
The case against Perplexity constitutes the latest legal battle between copyright holders and AI developers over the unauthorized use of proprietary content to train models and generate user responses.This is the second lawsuit the publication has filed against an AI company. The company previously sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft in December 2023 for training its systems on millions of Times articles for free. Meanwhile, this is the second legal challenge to Perplexity, having previously been filed in August 2024 by Dow Jones, which owns the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. In September, another AI company, Anthropic, agreed to pay $1.5 billion to book authors and publishers after a judge ruled that the company illegally downloaded and stored copyrighted books to build its AI systems.The Times also signed a multi-year licensing agreement with Amazon, allowing the tech giant to use its editorial content to train Amazon’s AI platform.
