New York Times sues Perplexity

The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against the AI software company Perplexity AI, accusing it of using millions of the newspaper’s articles without permission to power its AI products.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in New York, alleges that Perplexity’s business model relies on scraping and copying copyrighted material, including content behind paywalls, as per a report by Reuters on the matter. The Times also claims that Perplexity’s AI tools have generated fabricated information, sometimes known as ‘hallucinations’, and falsely attributed these inaccuracies to the newspaper by displaying them alongside its trademarks.

As per Reuters, a spokesperson for the Times stated that while the organisation believes in the ethical development of AI, it objects to the “unlicensed use” of its content to build and promote Perplexity’s products. The newspaper is seeking damages and a court order to stop the alleged activity.

Perplexity’s head of communication, Jesse Dwyer, dismissed the lawsuit, characterising it as an unsuccessful tactic historically used by publishers against new technologies, adds the report. The startup has previously stated it does not scrape data to build its core models but instead indexes web pages and provides citations.

This legal action is the latest in a series of disputes between publishers and AI companies over the use of copyrighted content. Perplexity, which is valued at about $20 billion, is also facing similar lawsuits from other publishers, including the Chicago Tribune, Dow Jones, the New York Post, and Encyclopedia Britannica. Social media platform Reddit has also previously sued the company for alleged data scraping.