The New York Times is suing Perplexity for copyright infringement

The New York Times on Friday filed suit against AI search startup Perplexity for copyright infringement, the second such lawsuit against an AI company. The Times joins several media outlets in suing Perplexity, including the Chicago Tribune, which also filed suit this week.

The Times’ lawsuit alleges that “Perplexity provides commercial products to its own point-of-sale users “without permission or compensation.”

The lawsuit – filed as several publishers, including The Times, negotiate deals with AI companies – is part of the same long-standing strategy. Recognizing that the AI ​​tide cannot be stemmed, publishers are using lawsuits as leverage in negotiations in hopes of forcing AI companies to formally license content in a way that compensates creators and maintains the economic viability of original journalism.

Perplexity tried to meet the compensation demands last year by launching a Publishers’ Program, which offers participating media outlets such as Gannett, TIME, Fortune and the Los Angeles Times a share of advertising revenue. In August, Perplexity also launched Comet Plus, allocating 80% of its $5 monthly fee to participating publishers, and recently signed a multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images.

“While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, we strongly object to Perplexity’s unlicensed use of our content to develop and promote their products,” Graham James, a spokesman for The Times, said in a statement. “We will remain committed to holding accountable companies that refuse to recognize the value of our work.”

Like the Tribune’s lawsuit, the Times takes issue with Perplexity’s method of answering user questions by gathering information from websites and databases to generate answers through its retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) products, such as its chatbots and the Comet browser AI assistant.

“Perplexity then repackages the original content into written responses to users,” the complaint reads. “These responses or results are often verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, summaries or abridgements of the original content, including the copyrighted works of The Times.”

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 that Perplexity’s search engine hallucinated information and falsely attributed it to the outlet, damaging the 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 chief communications officer, told TechCrunch. “Luckily it never worked, otherwise we would all be talking about this by telegraph.”

(Publishers have sometimes won or shaped major legal battles over new technologies, resulting in settlements, licensing regimesAnd court precedents.)

The lawsuit comes just over a year after The Times sent a cease and desist letter to Perplexity demanding that the company stop using the content for summaries and other output. The outlet claims it has contacted Perplexity several times over the past 18 months to stop using the content unless an agreement could be negotiated.

This isn’t the first battle The Times has had with an AI company. The Times is also suing OpenAI and its backer Microsoft, claiming the two trained their AI systems with millions of articles from the outlet without offering compensation. OpenAI has argued that using publicly available data for AI training is “fair use,” and has leveled its own accusations at the Times, claiming the outlet manipulated ChatGPT to find evidence.

That case is still ongoing, but a similar lawsuit against OpenAI competitor Anthropic could set a precedent regarding fair use for training AI systems in the future. In that lawsuit, in which authors and publishers sued the AI ​​company for using pirated books to train its models, the court ruled that while legally obtained books can be a safe fair use application, pirated books infringe copyright. Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement.

The Times’ lawsuit adds to mounting legal pressure on Perplexity. Last year, News Corp – owner of The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and the New York Post, among others – made similar claims against Perplexity. That list grew through 2025 to include Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster, Nikkei, Asahi Shimbun and Reddit.

Other media outlets, including Wired and Forbes, have accused Perplexity of plagiarism and unethically crawling and scraping content from websites that have explicitly stated they do not want to be scrapped. This last claim is one that internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare recently confirmed.

In its lawsuit, The Times asks the courts to make Perplexity pay for the damage it allegedly caused and to ban the startup from continuing to use its content.

The Times is clearly not above partnering with AI companies that compensate for the work of its reporters. The outlet signed a multi-year deal with Amazon earlier this year to license the content to train the tech giant’s AI models. Several other publishers and media companies have entered into licensing agreements with AI companies to use their content for training and for use in chatbot responses. OpenAI has signed deals with Associated Press, Axel Springer, Vox Media, The Atlantic and more.

This article has been updated with comments from Perplexity.