The New York Times sues Perplexity, claiming it has lifted its content without permission

Perplexity, an emerging player in the AI search landscape, is embroiled in a serious legal battle as The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against the startup. The complaint alleges that Perplexity has unlawfully copied and disseminated articles from the Times, infringing on copyright laws. According to the suit, the startup reportedly reproduced paywalled content either verbatim or with minimal alterations, jeopardizing the newspaper’s subscription and licensing revenue streams. This is not the first time Perplexity has faced scrutiny over its use of copyrighted material. Major publications such as Forbes and Wired have accused the company of extracting their content while circumventing anti-scraping measures. These allegations suggest that Perplexity's technology has been repackaging premium articles in a manner that infringes on intellectual property rights. Additionally, Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, has joined the legal fray with its own allegations of copyright infringement against Perplexity. The startup has yet to respond to a request for comment from Business Insider regarding these developments. In a blog post from the previous year, Perplexity claimed that it has always prioritized transparency, stating that it provides source listings and in-line citations for all parts of its answers. The company positioned itself as a transformative tool for users looking to acquire knowledge about various topics. Perplexity is not only facing challenges from traditional media outlets. Social media platform Reddit has also filed a lawsuit, accusing the startup of building a multibillion-dollar enterprise by exploiting its content through search-engine caches to bypass technical barriers. Reddit contends that this approach allowed Perplexity to evade payment and access restrictions. The lawsuit from The New York Times coincides with its ongoing legal proceedings against OpenAI, where a federal judge recently mandated OpenAI to provide 20 million de-identified ChatGPT logs. This is part of an effort to determine if the Times' articles appear in the outputs generated by the model. Furthermore, a coalition of media entities, including Axel Springer, which owns Business Insider, has initiated legal action against Cohere, another AI company. They accuse Cohere of repurposing their content without authorization, to which Cohere has responded by labeling the lawsuit as misguided and indicative of a misunderstanding of its business practices and technology applications.