The New York Times filed a lawsuit against AI search startup Perplexity on Friday for copyright infringement, the second lawsuit against an AI company. The Times joins several media corporations suing Perplexity, including the Chicago Tribune, which also filed suit this week.
The Times' lawsuit alleges that “Perplexity makes available to its own users industrial products that replace” the outlet “without permission or compensation.”
The lawsuit — filed at the same time as several publishers, including The Times, are negotiating deals with AI firms — is a component of the identical strategy that has been happening for years. With no strategy to stop the tide of AI, publishers are using lawsuits as leverage in negotiations, hoping to force AI corporations to officially license content in a way that compensates creators and maintains the economic viability of original journalism.
Perplexity tried to deal with compensation demands by launching a publishing program last yr that offers participating publishers corresponding to Gannett, TIME, Fortune and the Los Angeles Times a share of promoting revenue. In August, Perplexity also launched Comet Plus, distributed 80% of its $5 monthly fee to participating publishers, and recently signed a multi-year licensing cope with Getty Images.
“While we consider in the moral and responsible use and development of AI, we strongly oppose Perplexity’s unlicensed use of our content to develop and promote its products,” Graham James, a Times spokesman, said in a press release. “We will proceed to work to carry accountable corporations that fail to acknowledge the worth of our work.”
Similar to the Tribune's lawsuit, the Times challenges Perplexity's approach to responding to user queries by collecting information from web sites and databases to generate responses through its Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) products, corresponding to its chatbots and Comet Browser's AI assistant.
“Perplexity then repackages the unique content into written responses to users,” the lawsuit says. “These responses or editions are sometimes verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, summaries or abbreviations of the unique content, including the Times’ copyrighted works.”
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Or, as James put it in his statement: “RAG allows Perplexity to crawl the Internet and steal content behind our paywall and deliver it to its customers in real time. This content should only be accessible to our paying subscribers.”
The Times also claims Perplexity's search engine hallucinated information and falsely attributed it to the outlet, damaging its brand.
“Publishers have been suing recent technology corporations for 100 years, starting from radio, television, web, social media and now AI,” Perplexity communications director Jesse Dwyer told TechCrunch. “Luckily it never worked out, otherwise we might all be talking about it by telegraph.”
(At times, publishers have won or helped shape major legal disputes over recent technologies, which have led to settlements, Licensing regulationsAnd Court precedents.)
The lawsuit comes just a little greater than a yr after the Times sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity asking the corporate to stop using its content for summaries and other editions. The broadcaster says it has contacted Perplexity several times during the last 18 months to stop using its content unless an agreement might be negotiated.
This isn't the primary battle the Times has fought with an AI company. The Times can be suing OpenAI and its backer Microsoft, claiming the 2 trained their AI systems on tens of millions of articles from the magazine without offering compensation. OpenAI has argued that using publicly available data for AI training constitutes “fair use” and has made its own accusations to the Times, claiming the medium manipulated ChatGPT to seek out evidence.
That case remains to be pending, but the same lawsuit against OpenAI competitor Anthropic could set a precedent regarding fair use for training AI systems in the longer term. In that lawsuit, wherein authors and publishers sued the AI company for using pirated books to coach its models, the court ruled that while legally purchased books might constitute protected fair use applications, pirated copies violated copyrights. Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement.
The Times' lawsuit increases legal pressure on Perplexity. Last yr, News Corp – which owns publishers corresponding to the Wall Street Journal, Barron's and the New York Post – made similar claims against Perplexity. This list was expanded in 2025 to incorporate Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster, Nikkei, Asahi Shimbun and Reddit.
Other media outlets, including Wired and Forbes, have accused Perplexity of plagiarism and unethical crawling and scraping of content from sites which have specifically stated that they don’t need to be scraped. The latter claim was recently confirmed by web infrastructure provider Cloudflare.
In its lawsuit, The Times is asking the courts to make Perplexity pay for the damage it allegedly caused and to ban the startup from further use of its content.
The Times is clearly not afraid to work with AI corporations that compensate their reporters for his or her work. The outlet struck a multi-year cope with Amazon earlier this yr to license its content to coach the tech giant's AI models. Several other publishers and media corporations have signed licensing deals with AI corporations to make use of their content for training and publication in chatbot responses. OpenAI has contracts with Associated Press, Axel Springer, Vox Media, The Atlantic and others.
