The New York Times filed suit in Manhattan federal court on Friday, accusing AI search company Perplexity of widespread copyright infringement and false attribution.
The lawsuit states that Perplexity’s answer engine scrapes “large chunks—at times entire articles” from nytimes.com, packages them into generated responses and competes directly with the newspaper’s own products “without permission or remuneration”. The publisher also claims the system hallucinates information and wrongly presents the fabrications as reporting by The Times.
Lawyers for The Times say editors warned Perplexity several times during the past 18 months to stop using the paper’s content, but the start-up continued while the two sides failed to reach a licensing agreement. The suit seeks damages and an injunction, although no monetary demand was specified.
Perplexity, founded in 2022 by former OpenAI researcher Aravind Srinivas and others, did not respond to a request for comment.
The action is the second AI-related lawsuit brought by The Times; in December 2023 it sued OpenAI and Microsoft for allegedly training models on millions of archived articles. It is also at least the 40th U.S. case in which copyright owners have challenged generative-AI practices.
Courts have yet to rule on the core fair-use questions, although some defendants have settled: in September Anthropic agreed to pay authors and publishers $1.5 billion after a judge found it had illegally downloaded and stored copyrighted books.
While litigating against Perplexity, The Times has struck licensing deals elsewhere. In May it agreed to let Amazon use recipes, sports journalism and other material to train AI models, and similar pacts have been signed by OpenAI, Microsoft and several European publishers.