The New York Times filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against AI search startup Perplexity on Friday, marking the second such lawsuit against an AI company. The Times joins multiple media outlets suing Perplexity, including the Chicago Tribune, which also filed suit this week.
The Times’ lawsuit alleges that Perplexity offers commercial products that serve as an alternative to Outlet to its users “without authorization or compensation.”
The lawsuit comes as several publishers, including The Times, are negotiating contracts with AI companies, part of the same strategy that has been going on for years. Recognizing that the tide of AI cannot be stemmed, publishers are using litigation as bargaining leverage, hoping to force AI companies to compensate creators and formally license content in a way that preserves the economic viability of original journalism.
Last year, Perplexity sought to meet compensation demands by launching a Publishers Program that gives a portion of ad revenue to participating outlets including Gannett, Time, Fortune and the Los Angeles Times. Perplexity also launched Comet Plus in August, allocating 80% of its $5 monthly fee to participating publishers, and recently signed a multi-year licensing agreement with Getty Images.
“While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, we firmly oppose Perplexity’s unauthorized use of our content to develop and promote its products,” Times spokesperson Graham James said in a statement. “We will continue to work to hold companies accountable who refuse to recognize the value of our work.”
Similar to the Tribune’s lawsuit, the Times takes issue with Perplexity’s methods of answering user questions by collecting information from websites and databases and generating responses through chatbots and search augmentation generation (RAG) products such as the Comet browser AI assistant.
“Perplexity then repackages the original content in a written response to the user,” the complaint states. “Such answers and output are often verbatim or near-exact reproductions, summaries, or summaries of the original content, including Times copyrighted material.”
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Or, as James said in a statement, “RAG allows Perplexity to crawl the Internet, steal content from behind our paywalls, and deliver it to our customers in real time. That content must be accessible only to our paying subscribers.”
The Times also claims that Perplexity’s search engine hallucinated the information and mistakenly identified it as belonging to the company, damaging the company’s brand.
“Publishers have been suing emerging technology companies for 100 years, across 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 telegraphing about this.”
(Publishers have also won or shaped major legal battles over new technologies, resulting in settlements, licensing regimes, and legal precedents.)
The lawsuit comes just over a year after the Times sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter asking it to stop using the content in summaries and other output. The outlet claims it has contacted Perplexity several times over the past 18 months asking it to stop using the content unless a negotiated agreement is reached.
This isn’t the first time the Times has taken on an AI company. The paper is also suing OpenAI and its backer Microsoft, alleging that the companies used millions of the outlet’s articles to train their AI systems without offering compensation. OpenAI filed its own complaint against the Times, arguing that using publicly available data for AI training constitutes “fair use” and alleging that the paper manipulated ChatGPT to find evidence.
While this case is still pending, a similar lawsuit against OpenAI’s competitor Anthropic could set a precedent regarding the fair use of training AI systems going forward. In this case, in which an author and publisher sued an AI company for using pirated books to train models, the court ruled that while legally obtained books may be safe fair use applications, pirated books infringe copyright. Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement.
The Times lawsuit adds to the legal pressure on Perplexity. Last year, News Corp., which owns media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and the New York Post, made similar claims against Perplexity. In 2025, that list also grew to include Encyclopedia Britannica, Merriam-Webster, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Asahi Shimbun, and Reddit.
Other news outlets, including Wired and Forbes, have accused Perplexity of plagiarism and unethically crawling and scraping content from websites that have made it clear that they do not want to be scraped. The latter claim was recently acknowledged by internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare.
In its lawsuit, the Times asks Perplexity to pay for the damages it allegedly caused and asks the court to bar the startup from continuing to use the content.
The Times is clearly not keen on working with AI companies to supplement the work of its reporters. Earlier this year, the company signed a multi-year deal with Amazon to license content to train the tech giant’s AI models. Several other publishers and media companies have entered into licensing agreements with AI companies to use their content for training and chatbot responses. OpenAI has deals with The Associated Press, Axel Springer, Vox Media, The Atlantic, and more.
This article has been updated with comment from Perplexity.
