The New York Times sues Perplexity, alleging copyright infringement

The New York Times on Friday filed a lawsuit against Perplexity, alleging the artificial intelligence startup has illegally copied and distributed its copyrighted content.

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.

Founded in 2022, Perplexity is best known for its AI-powered search engine that gives users simple answers to questions. The startup has raised more than $1.5 billion in funding from investors including IVP, New Enterprise Associates and Nvidia, according to PitchBook.

“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,” Jesse Dwyer, head of communication at Perplexity, said in a statement.

The lawsuit from The Times on Friday serves as the latest example of how media companies and publishers are working to protect their intellectual property during the AI boom.

The Times is already involved in another ongoing copyright suit against Microsoft and OpenAI, which alleges the companies improperly used The Times’ content to train their AI models. That suit was filed in the Southern District of New York in 2023.

In September, AI startup Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit with a group of authors who claimed that the company had illegally downloaded their books and others from pirated databases.

That settlement makes up the largest publicly reported copyright recovery.

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