New York Times Sues Perplexity AI Over Copyright

The New York Times filed a federal lawsuit against Perplexity AI on Friday, accusing the artificial intelligence startup of copyright infringement by copying, distributing, and displaying millions of its articles without authorization to power its generative AI tools. The suit, lodged in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, marks the latest escalation in the ongoing tensions between news publishers and AI companies over the use of journalistic content.

The newspaper alleges that Perplexity's business model relies on scraping and repurposing its proprietary material, including paywalled articles, videos, and podcasts, to generate responses that often reproduce the content verbatim or in substantially similar form. This practice, the Times claims, directly competes with its own offerings and deprives the publication of revenue and control over its work. Additionally, the lawsuit accuses Perplexity of producing fabricated information, known as hallucinations, and falsely attributing it to the Times while displaying the newspaper's registered trademarks, which harms its brand credibility.

A spokesperson for the Times, Graham James, stated, "While we believe...