The New York Times is suing Perplexity for copyright infringement

The New York Times on Friday filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence research startup Perplexity for copyright infringement, the second lawsuit against an AI company. The Times joins several media outlets that have filed a lawsuit against Perplexity, including the Chicago Tribune, which also filed suit this week.

“Perplexity provides commercial products to its users that replace the ‘executor’ without permission or compensation,” the Times lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit — filed even as several publishers, including The Times, are negotiating with AI companies — is part of the same strategy that has been going on for years. Realizing that the AI ​​wave is unstoppable, publishers are using lawsuits as leverage in negotiations in hopes of forcing AI companies to officially license content in ways that compensate creators and preserve the economic viability of original journalism.

Perplexity has tried to address compensation demands by launching a Publisher Program last year, which offers participating 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 inked a multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images.

“While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of artificial intelligence, we strongly object to Perplexity’s unauthorized use of our content to develop and promote its products,” Graham James, a spokesman for The Times, said in a statement. “We will continue to work to hold companies accountable that refuse to acknowledge the value of our work.”

Similar to the Tribune’s lawsuit, the Times objects to Perplexity’s method of responding to user inquiries by collecting information from websites and databases to generate responses via Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) products, such as chatbots and AI assistants for the Comet browser.

“Perplexity then repackages the original content into written responses to users,” the lawsuit states. “These responses, or outputs, are often verbatim or near-verbatim copies, summaries, or abbreviations of the original content, including The Times’s copyrighted work.”

Or, as James said 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. This content should only be available to our paying subscribers.”

The Times also alleges that the Perplexity search engine misrepresented information and wrongly attributed it to the outlet, harming its brand.

“Publishers have been suing new technology companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, television, the internet, social media, and now AI,” Jesse Dwyer, head of communications at Perplexity, told TechCrunch. “Fortunately it never worked out, otherwise we would all be talking about this over the telegraph.”

(Occasionally, publishers have won or formed major legal battles over new technologies, resulting in settlements, licensing regimes, and case law.)

The lawsuit comes just over a year after the Times sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity demanding that it stop using its content in briefs and other output. The outlet claims to have contacted Perplexity multiple times over the past 18 months to stop using its content unless an agreement was negotiated.

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

This case is still ongoing, but a similar lawsuit directed 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 an AI company for using pirated books to train its models, the court ruled that while legally obtained books may be a safe application of fair use, pirated books violate copyright. Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement.

The Times’ lawsuit adds to mounting legal pressure on Perplexity. Last year, News Corp – which owns outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and the New York Post – made similar allegations against Perplexity. This list grew in 2025 to also include Encyclopedia Britannica, Merriam-Webster, Nikkei, Asahi Shimbun, and Reddit.

Other outlets, including Wired and Forbes, have accused Perplexity of plagiarism, unethically crawling, and scraping content from websites that it explicitly indicated it did not want to be taken down. The latter claim is one that was recently confirmed by internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare.

In its lawsuit, the Times is asking the courts to make Perplexity pay for the harm it allegedly caused and bar the startup from continuing to use its content.

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

This article has been updated with comment from Perplexity.