The New York Times filed a lawsuit on Friday against artificial intelligence startup Perplexity, alleging the company copied and distributed its copyrighted content without permission.
The complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, claims Perplexity scraped The Times’ articles, videos, podcasts, and other material to generate responses to user queries. According to the suit, the startup produces outputs that are “identical or substantially similar” to The Times’ content.
“While we support the ethical and responsible use of AI, we strongly oppose Perplexity’s unlicensed use of our content to develop and promote their products,” said Graham James, a spokesperson for The Times. “We will continue to hold companies accountable that fail to recognize the value of our work.”
The Chicago Tribune filed a similar lawsuit against Perplexity on Thursday, alleging the startup scraped and distributed its content without authorization.
Founded in 2022, Perplexity is known for its AI-powered search engine that provides users with concise answers to questions. The company has raised over $1.5 billion from investors, including IVP, New Enterprise Associates, and Nvidia.
“Publishers have been challenging new technology for more than a century—radio, TV, the internet, social media, and now AI. Historically, those lawsuits haven’t stopped innovation,” said Jesse Dwyer, head of communication at Perplexity.
The lawsuit highlights the ongoing efforts of media companies to protect intellectual property amid the rapid growth of AI. The Times is also pursuing another copyright case against Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging the companies used its content to train AI models, filed in 2023 in the Southern District of New York.
In a related development, AI startup Anthropic agreed in September to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by authors claiming the company illegally downloaded their works from pirated databases, marking the largest publicly reported copyright settlement to date.