New York Times sues Perplexity AI over alleged unlawful copying of content

New Delhi: The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, alleging that the San Francisco-based startup copied, distributed and displayed millions of its articles without permission to support its generative AI products, according to a Reuters report.

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, states that Perplexity relied on scraping and reproducing material, including content behind the Times’ paywall. 

The newspaper has also alleged that Perplexity’s AI tools generated fabricated content, or “hallucinations”, and wrongly associated those outputs with the Times by displaying them alongside its registered trademarks.

“While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, we firmly object to Perplexity's unlicensed use of our content to develop and promote their products,” NYT spokesperson Graham James said in a statement.

The Times is seeking damages, injunctive relief and other legal remedies to halt what it describes as the unauthorised use of its work. The action follows a cease-and-desist notice issued more than a year ago.

Perplexity, valued at about $20 billion, is already the subject of several legal disputes. It was sued by the Chicago Tribune a day earlier and is also facing litigation from

Encyclopedia Britannica, Dow Jones and the New York Post. The company has disputed the allegations. Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity’s head of communication, described the lawsuits as an unsuccessful tactic used by publishers against emerging technologies.

Perplexity has previously said it does not scrape data to build foundation models but instead indexes public web pages and provides factual citations.

The case adds to wider tensions between publishers and technology firms over the use of copyrighted material to train and operate AI systems.

In October, Reddit filed a lawsuit in New York federal court accusing Perplexity and three other firms of unlawfully scraping its data. The Times has also been in dispute with OpenAI, although it has permitted Amazon to use its editorial content for AI-driven products such as Alexa.