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MANHATTAN (CN) — The San Francisco-based tech company Perplexity became the latest artificial intelligence firm to be sued for copyright infringement, with Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster accusing it of scraping and plagiarizing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted online articles to feed Perplexity’s “answer engine” chatbot.
Filed in Manhattan federal court late Wednesday evening, Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster accuse Perplexity in 55-page civil complaint of violating their copyrights both at the curation stage when it uses a software program called “PerplexityBot” to crawl and scrape their websites for Perplexity’s “answer engine,” and also at the input stage when it reproduces copyrighted articles that are responsive to user searches to prompt responses from its retrieval-augmented generation output of its large language model.
“These responses often contain full or partial verbatim reproductions of plaintiffs’ copyrighted articles,” the reference entities say in the complaint. “At other times, Perplexity’s answers are reworded into text that resembles, paraphrases, or summarizes plaintiffs’ copyrighted works.”
According to the complaint, Perplexity’s software and other third-party “crawlers” it relies on “have ignored or evaded technological features, such as robots.txt, designed specifically to guard against **** such crawling and to instruct web crawlers to refrain from copying digital content.”
The companies also claim that Perplexity repeatedly misquotes both and generates fictitious and fake news stories attributed to the paper, which AI developers euphemistically refer to as “hallucinations,” falsely attributed to the companies by displaying the AI alongside their famous trademarks.
Representatives for Perplexity did not respond to requests for comment Thursday afternoon.
The company faces another lawsuit in the same court filed in 2024 by two outlets owned by media baron Rupert Murdoch: Dow Jones and New York Post.
Founded in late 2022, Perplexity calls itself an “AI-powered Swiss Army Knife for information discovery and curiosity.” It aims to disrupt Google and Meta’s market domination in the online search and advertising industry.
Perplexity AI has raised tens of millions of dollars from prominent tech investors, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos who backed the startup early during a January 2024 funding round that valued the company at over $500 million.
The company recently secured $200 million in new capital at a $20 billion valuation.
Over the summer in 2025, outlets reported that technology giants like Meta and Apple have been considering Perplexity as a potential target for acquisition.
A separate multidistrict litigation against OpenAI and Microsoft, over their practice of using copyrighted newspaper stories to train artificial intelligence chatbots, has been consolidated in the Southern District of New York.
Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein dismissed some of the claims made by media organizations but allowed the bulk of the case to advance, possibly to a jury trial.
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