The New York Times is suing Perplexity for copyright infringement

The New York Times filed suit Friday against AI hunt startup Perplexity for copyright infringement, its 2nd suit against an AI company. The Times joins respective media outlets suing Perplexity, including the Chicago Tribune, which besides filed suit this week.

The Times’s suit claims that “Perplexity provides commercialized products to its ain users that substitute” for the outlet, “without support oregon remuneration.” 

The suit – filed adjacent arsenic respective publishers, including The Times, negociate deals with AI firms – is portion of the same, ongoing years-long strategy. Recognizing the AI tide cannot beryllium stopped, publishers usage lawsuits arsenic leverage successful negotiations successful the hopes of forcing AI companies to formally licence contented successful ways that compensate creators and support the economical viability of archetypal journalism.

Perplexity tried to code compensation demands by launching a Publishers’ Program past year, which offers participating outlets similar Gannett, TIME, Fortune and the Los Angeles Times a stock of advertisement revenue. In August, Perplexity besides launched Comet Plus, allocating 80% of its $5 monthly interest to participating publishers, and precocious struck a multi-year licensing woody with Getty Images.

“While we judge successful the ethical and liable usage and improvement of AI, we firmly entity to Perplexity’s unlicensed usage of our contented to make and beforehand their products,” Graham James, a spokesperson for The Times, said successful a statement. “We volition proceed to enactment to clasp companies accountable that garbage to admit the worth of our work.”

Similar to the Tribune’s suit, the Times takes contented with Perplexity’s method for answering idiosyncratic queries by gathering accusation from websites and databases to make responses via its retrieval-augmented procreation (RAG) products, similar its chatbots and Comet browser AI assistant. 

“Perplexity past repackages the archetypal contented successful written responses to users,” the suit reads.
“Those responses, oregon outputs, often are verbatim oregon near-verbatim reproductions, summaries, oregon abridgments of the archetypal content, including The Times’s copyrighted works.”  

Or, arsenic James enactment it successful his statement, “RAG allows Perplexity to crawl the net and bargain contented from down our paywall and present it to its customers successful existent time. That contented should lone beryllium accessible to our paying subscribers.”

The Times besides claims Perplexity’s hunt motor has hallucinated accusation and falsely attributed it to the outlet, which damages its brand.

Perplexity could not beryllium reached for comment.

The suit comes conscionable implicit a twelvemonth aft The Times sent a cease and desist missive to Perplexity demanding it halt utilizing its contented for summaries and different output. The outlet claims it has contacted Perplexity respective times implicit the past 18 months to halt utilizing its contented unless an statement could beryllium negotiated.

This isn’t the archetypal combat The Times has picked with an AI firm. The Tims is besides suing OpenAI and its backer Microsoft, claiming the 2 trained their AI systems with millions of the outlet’s articles without offering compensation. OpenAI has argued that its usage of publically disposable information for AI grooming constitutes “fair use,” and has shot its ain accusations astatine the Times, claiming the outlet manipulated ChatGPT to find evidence. 

That lawsuit is inactive ongoing, but a akin suit directed against OpenAI rival Anthropic could acceptable a precedent successful regards to just usage for grooming AI systems going forward. In that suit, successful which authors and publishers sued the AI steadfast for utilizing pirated books to bid its models, the tribunal ruled that portion lawfully acquired books mightiness beryllium a harmless just usage application, pirated ones infringe connected copyrights. Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 cardinal settlement. 

The Times’s suit adds to mounting ineligible unit connected Perplexity. Last year, News Corp – which owns outlets similar The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and the New York Post – made akin claims against Perplexity. That database grew successful 2025 to besides see Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster, Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun, and Reddit.

Other outlets, including Wired and Forbes, person accused Perplexity of plagiarism and unethically crawling and scraping contented from websites that person explicitly indicated they don’t privation to beryllium scraped. The second assertion is 1 that net infrastructure supplier Cloudflare precocious confirmed. 

In its suit, The Times is asking the courts to marque Perplexity wage for the harm allegedly caused and prohibition the startup from continuing to usage its content. 

The Times is intelligibly not supra moving with AI firms that compensate for its reporters’ work. The outlet earlier this year struck a multiyear woody with Amazon to licence its contented to bid the tech giant’s AI models. Several different publishers and media companies person signed licensing deals with AI firms to usage their contented for grooming and to diagnostic successful chatbot responses. OpenAI has inked deals with Associated Press, Axel Springer, Vox Media, The Atlantic, and more.