Major Newspapers File Lawsuits Against AI Firm Perplexity

Claims of Unlawful Content Scraping and Reproduction

The New York Times and Chicago Tribune have lodged lawsuits against the AI company Perplexity, alleging infringement of their copyrighted materials. Despite being served with multiple cease-and-desist orders from these publications, Perplexity reportedly continued using the content without reaching any settlement.

According to the lawsuit filed by The Times, Perplexity infringed their copyrights primarily in two ways. Firstly, it scraped data from their website, including real-time updates, to train AI models and channel content into systems like the Claude chatbot and Comet browser. Secondly, The Times claimed that Perplexity's AI-generated content often replicated their articles exactly, which was presented as an output of Perplexity’s products to users.

False Attribution and Brand Damage Concerns

The Times further cited incidents where Perplexity allegedly tarnished its reputation by attributing false information—referred to as hallucinations—to their brand, thereby misleading their audience.

Echoing similar grievances, the Chicago Tribune filed its lawsuit against Perplexity, claiming that outputs generated by Perplexity's generative AI systems were either identical or remarkably similar to their content. According to the Tribune, these actions suggest that Perplexity illegally copied a vast amount of the Tribune’s copyrighted pieces, including stories, images, and videos to enhance its AI tools.

Ongoing Legal Battles in the AI Space

These cases are part of a larger trend where media outlets have increasingly targeted AI enterprises for copyright violations in the United States. Previously, The Times also pursued legal actions against tech giants like OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of using its content without consent to develop their language models. This earlier case remains open.

AI Companies and Media Licenses

However, not all interactions between copyright holders and AI companies are contentious. Some companies have managed to secure licensing deals with media organizations. For instance, OpenAI has successfully entered numerous agreements with publishers, and a notable deal between The Times and Amazon was valued at approximately $25 million annually, underlining the potential for cooperation instead of conflict.