New York Times sues Perplexity AI over illegal’ copying of content

The New York Times (NYT) has significantly escalated the legal battle between publishers and the AI industry, filing a federal lawsuit against the high-flying generative AI search startup Perplexity AI. The Times accuses Perplexity of the "illegal copying, distribution, and display of millions" of its copyrighted articles to train and power its products.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, is the second major action taken by the NYT against an AI company, following its suit against OpenAI and Microsoft last year. It adds enormous pressure on Perplexity, which is already battling similar legal claims from the Chicago Tribune, Dow Jones, and others.

The core allegations: Verbatim theft and brand damage

The Times’ central claim is that Perplexity's business model relies on scraping and copying content, including paywalled material, to generate answers that directly compete with the publication, thereby constituting unfair use and copyright infringement.

Key allegations in the lawsuit include:

• Systematic reproduction: The Times claims Perplexity's generative AI tools frequently reproduce its articles verbatim or in substantially similar form, sometimes generating entire articles in response to a simple user query.

• Competing products: The lawsuit asserts that Perplexity’s paid offerings serve as a direct substitute for The Times's own subscription journalism, profiting from the work without compensation or licensing.

• False attribution & hallucination: The NYT also accuses Perplexity of violating its trademark by producing fabricated content, or "hallucinations," and falsely attributing this made-up information to The Times, thereby damaging the newspaper’s reputation for factual accuracy.

The Times revealed it had sent multiple cease-and-desist notices to Perplexity over the past 18 months, demanding the startup stop using its content until a licensing agreement could be negotiated, which Perplexity allegedly ignored.

Perplexity's defense

Jesse Dwyer, Head of Communications for Perplexity, dismissed the lawsuit, arguing that such legal actions are a predictable, but historically unsuccessful, tactic used by publishers to slow emerging technologies.

Perplexity maintains that it does not scrape data to train its foundational models but instead indexes public webpages and provides factual citations, a practice it views as protected under the principle of the "open web."

This lawsuit intensifies the ongoing debate over the boundaries of "fair use" in the AI age, forcing courts to determine whether copying and summarizing copyrighted journalism for commercial, AI-driven products constitutes infringement.

The Times is seeking significant damages and a permanent injunction to prevent Perplexity from further using its content without permission.