The New York Times Is Suing Perplexity For Copyright Infringement

The New York Times is suing Perplexity for copyright infringement, accusing the AI startup of repackaging its paywalled reporting without permission. TechCrunch reports: The Times joins several media outlets suing Perplexity, including the Chicago Tribune, which also filed suit this week. The Times' suit claims that 'Perplexity provides commercial products to its own users that substitute' for the outlet, 'without permission or remuneration.' '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,' Graham James, a spokesperson for The Times, said in a statement. 'We will continue to work to hold companies accountable that refuse to recognize the value of our work.'

Similar to the Tribune's suit, the Times takes issue with Perplexity's method for answering user queries by gathering information from websites and databases to generate responses via its retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) products, like its chatbots and Comet browser AI assistant. 'Perplexity then repackages the original content in written responses to users,' the suit reads. 'Those responses, or outputs, often are verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, summaries, or abridgments of the original content, including The Times's copyrighted works.'

Or, as James put it in his statement, 'RAG allows Perplexity to crawl the internet and steal content from behind our paywall and deliver it to its customers in real time. That content should only be accessible to our paying subscribers.' The Times also claims Perplexity's search engine has hallucinated information and falsely attributed it to the outlet, which damages its brand. 'Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media, and now AI,' Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity's head of communications, told TechCrunch. 'Fortunately it's never worked, or we'd all be talking about this by telegraph.'

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