The New York Times is suing Perplexity for copyright infringement

The New York Times filed a lawsuit on Friday against AI search company Perplexity, accusing the startup of copyright infringement — marking the publication’s second significant legal action against an AI company. The Times now joins several other media organizations, including the Chicago Tribune, which also sued Perplexity this week.

According to the lawsuit, “Perplexity provides commercial products to its own users that substitute for the Times’ journalism, “without permission or remuneration.”

This legal strategy reflects a broader pattern among publishers. Even as many negotiate licensing agreements with AI companies — including the Times itself — they are also using lawsuits as leverage. The goal is to pressure AI firms to formally license content, compensate creators, and help sustain the economic foundation of professional journalism in an era where AI-generated summaries threaten traditional business models.

Perplexity has recently tried to address these concerns. Last year, it launched a Publishers’ Program, offering revenue-sharing for outlets such as Gannett, TIME, Fortune, and the Los Angeles Times. In August, the company rolled out Comet Plus, which allocates 80% of its $5 subscription fee to participating publishers. It also signed a multi-year licensing agreement with Getty Images.

However, the Times remains unsatisfied.
A spokesperson, Graham James, stated:

“While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, we firmly object to Perplexity’s unlicensed use of our content to develop and promote their products. We will continue to work to hold companies accountable that refuse to recognize the value of our work.”

Similar to the Tribune’s lawsuit, the Times alleges that Perplexity uses a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system to pull data from websites and databases — including Times articles — to generate responses through its AI chatbots and Comet browser assistant.

The lawsuit claims:

“Perplexity then repackages the original content in written responses to users. Those responses, or outputs, often are verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, summaries, or abridgments of the original content, including The Times’s copyrighted works.”

James further emphasized
“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 argues that Perplexity has hallucinated false information and improperly attributed it to the Times, harming the publication’s reputation.

Perplexity pushed back on the suit.
Jesse Dwyer, the company’s head of communications, said:

Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media, and now AI. Fortunately, it’s never worked, or we’d all be talking about this by telegraph.”

(Despite Dwyer’s remark, publishers have historically won or shaped major legal battles over emerging technologies through settlements, licensing frameworks, and influential court precedents.)

The Times’ action comes roughly a year after it sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist notice demanding the company stop using its content unless a licensing agreement was reached. The Times says it repeatedly contacted Perplexity over the past 18 months, but the company continued using its journalism.

This lawsuit mirrors the Times’ ongoing battle against OpenAI and Microsoft, filed under claims that millions of Times articles were used to train AI models without compensation. OpenAI argues that using publicly available data for training constitutes fair use and has accused the Times of deliberately manipulating queries to produce incriminating results.

A separate lawsuit involving Anthropic — where authors and publishers alleged the company trained AI models using pirated books — may set an important precedent. In that case, the judge suggested that while using lawfully acquired books might fall under fair use, using pirated material does not. Anthropic ultimately agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement.

The Times’ complaint adds to increasing legal pressure on Perplexity. In the past year, News Corp, Encyclopedia Britannica, Merriam-Webster, Nikkei, Asahi Shimbun, and Reddit have all made similar allegations. Outlets such as Wired and Forbes have accused the startup of plagiarising their content and of ignoring robots.txt directives intended to prevent scraping, a claim later substantiated by Cloudflare.

The Times is asking the court to require Perplexity to compensate for alleged damages and to prohibit the company from continuing to use Times content without permission.

Despite its lawsuits, the Times is not against working with AI companies that agree to compensate journalists. Earlier this year, the publication signed a multi-year licensing agreement with Amazon to train its AI models. Many media companies have signed similar deals with AI firms, including OpenAI, which has partnered with the Associated Press, Axel Springer, Vox Media, The Atlantic, and others.

This article has been updated with a comment from Perplexity.