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New York Times takes Perplexity AI to court over 'illegal' copying of content
Perplexity AI has drawn criticism from several publishers and is involved in multiple legal disputes as it pushes aggressively into the competitive AI market.
Perplexity AI is facing fresh legal trouble after The New York Times sued the company on Friday, accusing it of copying, distributing and displaying millions of Times articles without permission to train and power its generative AI products.
The fast-growing startup has already drawn criticism from several publishers and is involved in multiple legal disputes as it pushes aggressively into the competitive AI market, according to a Reuters report.
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What are the allegations?
According to the NYT, Perplexity’s tools not only relied on scraped and copied content, including paywalled material, but also generated fabricated information, or “hallucinations,” that was falsely presented as Times reporting and displayed alongside the paper’s registered trademarks.
A spokesperson for the NYT, Graham James, said the company supported ethical AI development but objected to Perplexity’s unlicensed use of its journalism.
The lawsuit seeks damages, an injunction and other remedies to stop the alleged misuse.
The Chicago Tribune also filed a lawsuit against Perplexity on Thursday, according to the Reuters report.
Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity’s head of communications, dismissed the complaints, arguing that publishers often use such tactics against new technologies.
The company has previously said it does not scrape data to build foundation models but merely indexes webpages and provides factual citations.
More on the lawsuit
The suit is filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York and it follows a cease-and-desist notice the Times sent more than a year ago. It adds to the ongoing conflict between publishers and tech firms over unauthorized use of copyrighted material.
In October, Reddit sued Perplexity in New York federal court, accusing it and three other companies of illegally scraping its data.
The $20-billion San Francisco startup is also facing lawsuits from Encyclopedia Britannica, Dow Jones, and the New York Post.
The Times, which has allowed Amazon to use its content for AI products like Alexa, is also in a dispute with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. Reuters previously reported that several AI companies were ignoring standard web protocols designed to block data scraping for generative AI systems.
