The New York Times sued an embattled artificial intelligence startup on Friday, accusing the firm of illegally copying millions of articles. The newspaper alleged Perplexity AI had distributed and displayed journalists’ work without permission en masse.
The Times said that Perplexity AI was also violating its trademarks under the Lanham Act, claiming the startup’s generative AI products create fabricated content, or “hallucinations”, and falsely attribute them to the newspaper by displaying them alongside its registered trademarks.
The newspaper said that Perplexity’s business model relies on scraping and copying content, including paywalled material, to power its generative AI products. Other publishers have made similar allegations.
The lawsuit is the latest salvo in a bitter, ongoing battle between publishers and tech companies over the use of copyrighted content without authorization to build and operate their AI systems.
Perplexity in particular has become a target of multiple legal disputes and faces similar accusations from a number of publishers as it tries to aggressively build market share in a hyper-competitive market for generative AI tools. Cloudflare, one of the world’s most prominent digital infrastructure companies, accused Perplexity earlier this year of hiding its web-crawling activities and scraping websites without permission – a serious accusation with potential copyright implications. Perplexity denied the allegations.
Perplexity has raised about $1.5bn in the past three years through multiple funding rounds, most recently closing a $200m round in September that valued the company at $20bn. It has attracted a variety of big-name investors, including Nvidia and Jeff Bezos, as money has flooded the AI industry.
San Francisco-based Perplexity AI also faced a lawsuit from the Rupert Murdoch-owned Dow Jones and the New York Post.
Multiple news outlets, including Forbes and Wired, have accused Perplexity of plagiarizing their content, in one case allegedly copying a Wired article about Perplexity’s own plagiarism issues. The Chicago Tribune, Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Encyclopedia Britannica have all additionally filed lawsuits against Perplexity in recent months, accusing the company of copyright infringement.
In October, social media company Reddit also sued Perplexity in New York federal court, accusing it and three other companies of unlawfully scraping its data to train Perplexity’s AI-based search engine.
Perplexity faces legal challenges from its fellow tech companies as well. Amazon last month filed a lawsuit against Perplexity over the search engine’s AI agent shopping feature. The suit alleged that Perplexity was covertly accessing Amazon users’ accounts and masking its AI browsing activities, which Perplexity has denied while accusing Amazon of bullying and attempting to stifle competitors.
Perplexity did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
