New York Times Sues Perplexity, Alleging Damage to Brand

The New York Times sued Perplexity Friday (Dec. 5), alleging that the artificial intelligence (AI) startup repeatedly violated its copyrights.

The New York Times reported Friday (Dec. 5) that the suit accuses Perplexity of violating its copyrights by retrieving The Times’ content with its AI-powered search engine and displaying large parts of that content in a way that competes with The Times.

The suit also accuses Perplexity of damaging the publisher’s brand by in some cases making up information and falsely attributing that information to The Times, according to the report.

The New York Times contacted Perplexity several times over the past 18 months, demanding that it stop using The Times’ content in its AI-powered search engine until the companies reach an agreement, per the report.

Reached by PYMNTS, Perplexity Head of Communication Jesse Dwyer said in an emailed statement: “Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media and now AI. Fortunately it’s never worked, or we’d all be talking about this by telegraph.”

According to The New York Times report, the publisher sued another AI startup, OpenAI, and its partner Microsoft in 2023, accusing them of training their AI on its content without its permission.

The publisher signed the first licensing agreement allowing its content to be used for generative AI in May, the report said. The deal allows Amazon to use The Times’ content in its AI platforms and to train its AI models, per the report.

Social media platform Reddit sued Perplexity and three data scraping firms in October, accusing them of harvesting its content without authorization.

Reddit’s complaint alleges that the companies collected and resold data from the platform’s discussion forms through automated tools.

It was reported in August that Japanese media company Nikkei and the Asahi Shimbun newspaper filed lawsuits accusing Perplexity of copyright infringement.

The companies alleged that the AI startup had, without their consent, “copied and stored article content from the servers of Nikkei and Asahi” and ignored a “technical measure” created to keep this from happening.

The companies also claimed that Perplexity’s answers had provided inaccurate information attributed to the newspapers’ articles, which “severely damages the credibility of newspaper companies.”

For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.