The New York Times sues Perplexity AI for ‘unfair usage’ of its content: What the lawsuit says

The New York Times has filed a lawsuit on Friday (December 5) against Perplexity. The publication alleged that the artificial intelligence (AI) startup has repeatedly violated its copyrights. In the lawsuit, filed in federal court in New York, the publication claims it had contacted Perplexity multiple times over the past 18 months, demanding that the AI company, known for its cutting-edge search engine, ceases using The Times’ material until a licensing agreement could be negotiated. However, Perplexity continued to use the content without permission or compensation, the lawsuit states.

“Perplexity provides commercial products to its own users that substitute for The Times, without permission or remuneration,” the lawsuit asserts.

What The New York Times’ lawsuit says about Perplexity

The lawsuit accuses Perplexity of violating copyrights primarily through its search engine, which generates direct responses to user queries using information retrieved from The Times’s digital platforms. It further claims that this distribution of content constitutes an unfair use of copyrighted material because Perplexity grabbed large chunks of the publication’s content and provided information that directly competes with The Times’s own offering.

In some cases, the lawsuit says, entire articles were presented to users. Furthermore, The Times accused the AI startup of damaging its brand by sometimes producing fabricated information and falsely attributing that made-up content to The New York Times.

Perplexity latest AI company to hit with lawsuit

The action against Perplexity constitutes the latest legal battle between copyright holders and AI developers over the unauthorised use of proprietary content for training models and generating user responses.

This is the second lawsuit the publication has filed against an AI company. It previously sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft in December 2023 for allegedly training their systems on millions of Times articles without compensation. Meanwhile, this is the second legal challenge against Perplexity, having previously been sued by Dow Jones, which owns The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, August 2024.

In September, another AI company Anthropic agreed to pay book authors and publishers $1.5 billion after a judge ruled the company had illegally downloaded and stored copyrighted books to build its AI systems.

The Times has also struck a multiyear licensing deal with Amazon to allow the tech giant to use its editorial content for training Amazon’s AI platforms.