The New York Times sues Perplexity, alleging copyright infringement

In a significant legal move, The New York Times has initiated a lawsuit against Perplexity, an artificial intelligence startup, claiming that it has unlawfully copied and distributed copyrighted material. This lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, accuses Perplexity of illicitly scraping The Times' articles, videos, podcasts, and other contents to create responses for user inquiries. According to the complaint, the outputs generated by Perplexity are described as "identical or substantially similar to" the original content from The Times. Graham James, a spokesperson for the newspaper, expressed strong disapproval of Perplexity's actions, stating, "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. We will continue to work to hold companies accountable that refuse to recognize the value of our work." Perplexity, known for its AI-driven search engine that provides straightforward answers to user questions, has not yet commented on the lawsuit. The startup, which began operations in 2022, has secured over $1.5 billion in funding from notable investors, including IVP, New Enterprise Associates, and Nvidia, as reported by PitchBook. This lawsuit highlights the ongoing struggle media companies face in protecting their intellectual property rights amid the rapid advancements in AI technology. The New York Times is already embroiled in another copyright case against Microsoft and OpenAI, which alleges that these companies used its content without permission to train their AI systems. That case was filed earlier in 2023. Additionally, in September, the AI startup Anthropic reached a landmark settlement of $1.5 billion to resolve a class action lawsuit brought by authors who accused the company of illegally downloading their works from pirated databases. This settlement stands as the largest publicly reported copyright recovery to date.