The New York Times filed a lawsuit on Friday against Perplexity, alleging that the artificial‑intelligence startup has illegally copied and distributed the newspaper’s copyrighted content.
The complaint, lodged in the Southern District of New York, accuses Perplexity of scraping the Times’ stories, videos, podcasts and other material to generate answers to user queries. According to the filing, the startup’s outputs are “identical or substantially similar” to the newspaper’s original reporting.
“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,” said Graham James, a spokesperson for the Times. “We will continue to work to hold companies accountable that refuse to recognize the value of our work.”
Perplexity, founded in 2022, is best known for its AI‑powered search engine that delivers concise answers to user questions. The company has raised more than $1.5 billion from investors such as IVP, New Enterprise Associates and Nvidia, according to PitchBook.
“Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years—radio, TV, the internet, social media and now AI. Fortunately it’s never worked, or we’d all be talking about this by telegraph,” said Jesse Dwyer, head of communications at Perplexity.
The Times’ lawsuit is the latest example of media owners tightening control over their intellectual property amid an AI boom. The newspaper is already engaged in a separate copyright case against Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging that the two firms used its articles to train large language models without permission. That suit, also filed in New York, was initiated in 2023.
In September, Anthropic settled a class‑action lawsuit with authors for $1.5 billion after the company was accused of downloading books from pirated databases to train its models. The settlement stands as the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in the AI space.
Industry analysts see these cases as a bellwether for how content creators will monetize their assets in the age of generative AI. If courts rule in favor of publishers, AI startups may be forced to negotiate licensing agreements that could add significant cost layers to model training and inference pipelines. For investors, the risk profile of AI‑focused ventures could shift, prompting a higher premium on companies that adopt transparent data‑sourcing practices.
From a technology standpoint, the dispute underscores the tension between data‑driven model performance and intellectual‑property compliance. While larger language models benefit from diverse, high‑quality training data, unchecked scraping raises legal exposure and could stifle innovation if the litigation environment becomes overly restrictive.
Venture firms that have backed Perplexity—particularly those with strategic ties to semiconductor makers like Nvidia—may need to reassess portfolio risk and encourage portfolio companies to adopt “clean‑room” data strategies. Such approaches involve curating licensed datasets and employing provenance tracking to demonstrate compliance, a practice that could become a competitive advantage as regulatory scrutiny intensifies.
Ultimately, the outcome of the Times’ suit could set a precedent for the entire AI ecosystem, shaping licensing frameworks, influencing funding valuations, and redefining the relationship between traditional media and emerging AI platforms.
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