The New York Times is suing Perplexity, alleging the AI search start-up repeatedly used its copyrighted articles without permission, despite 18 months of warnings to stop.
Filed today in federal court in New York, the complaint says Perplexity’s system reproduced large portions of Times reporting – including entire articles in ways that competed directly with the paper’s journalism, violating copyright and damaging its brand. The suit also accuses Perplexity of fabricating information and falsely attributing it to the Times.
“Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media and now AI,” Jesse Dwyer, a Perplexity spokesperson, told The Times. “Fortunately, it’s never worked, or we’d all be talking about this by telegraph.”
The case adds to more than 40 ongoing U.S. lawsuits over generative AI training data, including actions by the Chicago Tribune and Dow Jones. It is the Times’s second major AI lawsuit, following a 2023 case against OpenAI and Microsoft.
The Times has also begun licensing its content, striking a multiyear generative-AI deal with Amazon in May, part of a broader wave of publisher agreements with tech companies.