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MANHATTAN (CN) — The New York Times sued the artificial intelligence startup Perplexity on Friday morning, accusing the search engine and chatbot product of scraping and republishing millions of the newspaper’s copyrighted articles, videos and podcasts to supply its database.
The New York City newspaper of record says in its complaint that Perplexity’s AI-driven technology unlawfully copies and repackages the Times’ content for distribution.
“In so doing, Perplexity has violated the protections that intellectual property law provides for the Times’s expressive, original journalism, which includes everything from news to opinion, culture to business, cooking to games, and shopping recommendations to sports,” the Times wrote in its complaint.
Represented by Steven Lieberman from Rothwell, Figg, Ernst & Manbeck, the New York Times’ complaint is comprised of five civil counts against Perplexity, including copyright infringement, trademark infringement and trademark dilution.
The Times argues in the complaint that Perplexity, which recently reached a $20 billion valuation, “has recognized the tremendous value of the kinds of content it takes for free.”
The startup’s scraping and republishing continued even after the New York Times sent cease-and-desist letters demanding again that 31-year-old CEO Aravind Srinivas immediately halt “all current and future unauthorized access and use” of Perplexity’s content.
The New York Times also claims that Perplexity repeatedly misquotes the newspaper and generates fake news, which AI developers euphemistically refer to as “hallucinations."
“For example, when asked which features Wirecutter liked about the Boppy Lounger — a product recalled for causing infant death — Perplexity provided a hallucinated output that falsely claimed Wirecutter praised this product,” the Times said. “Wirecutter has never reviewed this product, much less recommended it.”
Rothwell Figg also represented the Chicago Tribune in a parallel five-count copyright infringement complaint against Perplexity on Friday.
The San Francisco-based tech startup is facing other pending civil copyright infringement suits from publishers in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, including complaints from Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones and New York Post and separately by Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster.
Perplexity’s head of communication shrugged off the lawsuits in a statement on Friday. “Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media and now AI,” Jesse Dwyer wrote. “Fortunately it’s never worked, or we’d all be talking about this by telegraph.”
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 when the company was valued at over $500 million.
A few months ago, the company reportedly secured commitments from investors for $200 million in new funding at a $20 billion valuation, positioning its AI search product as a rival to online search monolith Google.
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