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The New York Times has launched a copyright infringement lawsuit against the AI search startup Perplexity, marking the newspaper’s second legal action targeting an artificial intelligence company. Filed on Friday, the case follows a similar complaint from the Chicago Tribune earlier this week, as more media organizations challenge the unauthorized use of their work by AI firms.
The complaint from The Times accuses Perplexity of offering services to users that directly replace access to the newspaper’s content without obtaining permission or providing payment. This legal move occurs amid broader efforts by publishers to secure licensing agreements with AI developers, using court battles as a tool to encourage fair compensation for journalistic material and sustain the business model of quality reporting.
Perplexity has responded to such concerns through initiatives like its Publishers Program, introduced last year, which shares advertising revenue with participants including Gannett, TIME, Fortune and the Los Angeles Times. The company also unveiled Comet Plus in August, directing 80 percent of its five-dollar monthly subscription to involved publishers, and recently finalized a multiyear licensing agreement with Getty Images.
Graham James, a Times spokesperson, stated that while the outlet supports ethical AI advancement, it opposes Perplexity’s unapproved exploitation of its material to build and market products. He emphasized the newspaper’s commitment to ensuring accountability for entities that undervalue journalistic contributions.
Like the Tribune’s recent filing, The Times focuses on Perplexity’s approach to user queries, which involves pulling data from online sources and databases to create answers through retrieval-augmented generation tools such as chatbots and the Comet browser assistant. The suit argues that these outputs frequently reproduce the source material in full, near-full, summarized or shortened forms, encompassing protected Times articles.
James described the process as enabling Perplexity to access paywalled content via web crawling and provide it instantly to users, bypassing the need for subscriber payments. The Times further alleges that Perplexity’s search tool has invented details and wrongly credited them to the newspaper, harming its reputation.
Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity’s communications lead, likened the situation to a century of unsuccessful publisher lawsuits against innovations like radio, television, the internet and social media. He suggested to reporters that such challenges have historically failed to halt technological progress.
Publishers have occasionally succeeded in these disputes, leading to financial resolutions, established licensing frameworks and influential judicial decisions. The Times previously issued a cease-and-desist notice to Perplexity more than a year ago, urging it to halt the use of its content in AI-generated summaries, and has made repeated outreach over the past 18 months to negotiate terms.
That is not The Times’ initial confrontation with AI providers; it’s also pursuing OpenAI and Microsoft in court over the use of vast amounts of its articles to train models without compensation. OpenAI maintains that training on public data qualifies as fair use and has countered claims of evidence fabrication by the newspaper.
A related case against Anthropic, involving authors and publishers over pirated books used in training, resulted in a court finding that while legally obtained materials may fall under fair use, unauthorized copies violate copyrights. Anthropic settled for 1.5 billion dollars in that matter.
The new suit intensifies scrutiny on Perplexity, which faced claims last year from News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and the New York Post. Additional accusers in 2025 include Encyclopedia Britannica, Merriam-Webster, Nikkei, Asahi Shimbun and Reddit.
Outlets like Wired and Forbes have raised issues of plagiarism and improper data extraction from sites that prohibit such practices, with internet services firm Cloudflare verifying instances of Perplexity bypassing anti-scraping measures.
The Times seeks judicial remedies including compensation for damages and a prohibition on future use of its content by Perplexity. Despite the litigation, the newspaper has partnered with AI entities that agree to pay, such as a multiyear content licensing pact with Amazon earlier this year for model training. Other media groups have arranged similar arrangements, with OpenAI reaching agreements with the Associated Press, Axel Springer, Vox Media, The Atlantic and others.
