The New York Times has filed a new copyright infringement lawsuit against Perplexity, escalating a growing wave of legal battles between media companies and AI platforms over the use of news content.
The complaint, submitted on Friday in a U.S. federal court, alleges that Perplexity copies and redistributes Times reporting through its AI search tools without permission or compensation. It is the second time the Times has taken an AI company to court, following its ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.
NYT Says Perplexity Is Replacing Its Journalism
According to the Times, Perplexity’s AI systems draw heavily from copyrighted articles — including pieces behind the Times’ paywall — to generate summaries and answers for users.
The lawsuit claims Perplexity “repackages” Times reporting through its retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology, sometimes producing responses that are nearly identical to original articles.
A spokesperson for the Times said Perplexity is “using our journalism to build its business without licensing or respecting the value of our work.”
Media Outlets Pile On
The Times is not alone. Several major publishers, including the Chicago Tribune, Britannica, Merriam-Webster, and multiple Japanese newspapers, have recently filed similar complaints accusing Perplexity of unauthorized scraping.
News Corp — owner of The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and the New York Post — has also been in conflict with the startup for more than a year.
Other outlets like Wired and Forbes have previously accused Perplexity of plagiarism and ignoring website rules that block AI scrapers. Cloudflare later confirmed that Perplexity accessed sites that had explicitly opted out of being scraped.
Perplexity Pushes Back
Perplexity denies wrongdoing. In a statement, the company’s head of communications, Jesse Dwyer, dismissed the legal action as just another chapter in the long-running tension between publishers and emerging technologies.
“Publishers have sued every new communications technology for a century—radio, TV, the internet, social media, and now AI,” Dwyer said. “If they had succeeded, we’d still be getting our news by telegraph.”
A Fight Over the Future of AI and Journalism
Perplexity has taken steps to address publisher concerns in the past year. It launched a revenue-sharing program that includes TIME, Fortune, Gannett, and the Los Angeles Times. It also rolled out Comet Plus, a subscription service that allocates most of its monthly fee to participating publishers. And in October, it struck a licensing deal with Getty Images.
But the Times argues those measures don’t excuse the company’s alleged use of its own content.
The lawsuit also claims Perplexity has generated fabricated information and wrongly cited the Times as the source, which the paper says harms its credibility.
A Larger Legal Battle Brewing
This latest lawsuit comes as courts are weighing how U.S. copyright law applies to AI systems trained on published work. A related case against Anthropic earlier this year resulted in a $1.5 billion settlement after a judge ruled that training AI on pirated books was infringement.
The outcome of these cases could define how AI systems access and use copyrighted journalism for years to come.
Meanwhile, the Times continues to negotiate licensing deals with AI companies — including a recent agreement with Amazon — signaling that the paper is open to partnerships, but only on its own terms.
