Key Points
- The New York Times has filed a copyright lawsuit against the AI startup Perplexity.
- The lawsuit alleges Perplexity illegally copied and used The Times’ content for its AI search engine.
- The Times claims Perplexity’s answers are sometimes nearly identical to its copyrighted work.
- This is part of a broader trend of media companies suing AI firms over intellectual property rights.
The New York Times is taking the AI startup Perplexity to court, accusing it of illegally copying millions of its articles to power its popular search engine. In the lawsuit, filed Friday in New York, the Times claims Perplexity scraped its content—including stories, videos, and podcasts—without permission.
The suit alleges that the AI company then used this material to generate answers for its users, sometimes producing responses nearly identical to the original Times articles.
A spokesperson for The Times said that while the company believes in responsible AI, it “firmly objects to Perplexity’s unlicensed use of our content.” They added that they will continue to hold companies accountable for using their work without paying for it.
Founded in 2022, Perplexity has quickly become a major player in the AI space, raising over $1.5 billion from top investors like Nvidia.
This lawsuit is the latest battle in a growing war between media companies and the booming AI industry. The Times is already in a similar legal fight with Microsoft and OpenAI, accusing them of using its articles to train their AI models.
The fight over copyrighted material is proving costly for AI firms. Recently, another AI startup, Anthropic, paid $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit from authors who claimed the company illegally used their books.
