New York Times Sues Perplexity AI, Alleges Copyright Violations

The New York Times sued the AI startup Perplexity on Friday, alleging it repeatedly violated the Times’ copyright protections by distributing its work to Perplexity users without permission or a deal with the paper.

The paper accused Perplexity of letting its AI-powered search engine scrape the Times’ journalism to regurgitate it when readers use its service, with the final product being “identical or substantially similar” to its published stories. It said it has repeatedly asked Perplexity for nearly two years to cease its actions, but to no avail.

“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,” Times spokesperson Graham James said in a statement. “We will continue to work to hold companies accountable that refuse to recognize the value of our work.”

The Times filed the case in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. It is seeking unspecified damages and an injunction to stop Perplexity’s allegedly illegal use of its work.

Perplexity did not respond to an immediate request for comment.

The lawsuit comes as more news publishers assert their legal rights against generative AI companies’ training of their large-language models. The Times in 2023 sued OpenAI and Microsoft for similar alleged copyright violations, and Dow Jones, the owner of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, among others, sued Perplexity in October 2024 over its allegedly wrongful use of its work.

Perplexity framed the Dow Jones case as reflective of “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,” and it is still being litigated.

Reddit also sued Perplexity in October for copyright violations, alleging it violated the website’s policies by scraping user comments.

The Times’ suit alleges Perplexity often reproduces Times content to users by reproducing large portions of stories — or whole articles — in response to queries. The paper also alleged Perplexity attributed fake information to users incorrectly attributed to the Times, phenomena known as “hallucinations,” in a violation of its trademark.

The Times struck a licensing agreement with Amazon in May to allow it to use the paper’s editorial content to train its AI models, joining other companies in striking deals with AI companies for such uses.

Perplexity has its own arrangement with news organizations, called the Publishers’ Program. On Friday, it announced that outlets including the Los Angeles Times, the Independent and ADWEEK were joining the program.

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