The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI on Friday (Dec 5), claiming that the artificial intelligence startup was copying, distributing and displaying millions of its articles without permission.
The startup has become a target of multiple legal disputes and faces similar accusations from a number of publishers as it tries to aggressively build market share in a hyper-competitive market for generative AI tools.
The Times said that Perplexity AI is also violating its trademarks under the Lanham Act, claiming the startup’s generative AI products create fabricated content, or “hallucinations”, and falsely attribute them to the newspaper by displaying them alongside its registered trademarks.
It said that Perplexity’s business model relied on scraping and copying content, including paywalled material.
“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,” NYT spokesperson Graham James said in a statement.
The NYT is seeking damages, injunctive relief and other equitable remedies to prevent Perplexity from continuing its alleged unauthorised use of content.
Perplexity, which was also sued by the Chicago Tribune on Thursday, did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
However, it had previously told Reuters that it was not scraping data for building foundation models, but rather indexing web pages and providing factual citations.
The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, comes more than a year after the NYT sent a cease and desist notice to Perplexity.
It is also the latest salvo in a bitter ongoing battle between publishers and tech companies over the use of copyrighted content without authorisation.
In October, social media company Reddit sued Perplexity in New York federal court, accusing it and three other companies of unlawfully scraping its data.
The San Francisco-based startup, which is valued at about US$20 billion, is also facing lawsuits from Encyclopedia Britannica and media baron Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones and the New York Post.
