New York Times sues Perplexity for copyright infringement and false attributions
The New York Times sued Perplexity AI for allegedly scraping millions of its copyrighted articles to train its AI search engine and generating user responses that substantially replicate its content. The complaint also alleges Perplexity falsely attributed hallucinated information to the Times by displaying the newspaper's trademark alongside fabricated content.
What happened
The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI in the Southern District of New York alleging the AI startup unlawfully scraped the Times' stories, videos, podcasts and other copyrighted content using sophisticated bots and crawlers from nytimes.com to train and power its AI models.
Perplexity's responses to user queries allegedly generate outputs that are identical or substantially similar to Times' content, and the startup allegedly attributed fabricated or false information to the Times by displaying the newspaper's registered trademark alongside hallucinated content.
Reported impact
According to the Times, Perplexity's outputs containing comprehensive information substantially overlapping with the original articles eliminate users' need to read the newspaper's original content, causing severe damage to the Times' economic model.
The Times alleges the copyright infringement involved millions of articles and was carried out through systematic, methodical, and unlawful copying and dissemination of the newspaper's content.
Index analysis
The lawsuit is notable for combining traditional copyright infringement claims with innovative trademark violation claims under the US Lanham Act, alleging that Perplexity falsely attributed hallucinated information to the Times.
Perplexity's head of communication responded that publishers have sued technology companies for over a century without success, beginning with radio and television through to the internet and social media.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.