TL;DR

The New York Times has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against AI search startup Perplexity, its second case against an AI company. The suit claims Perplexity’s retrieval-augmented generation technology reproduces Times content “verbatim or near-verbatim” without permission.

The Case Against Perplexity

The Times alleges that Perplexity “provides commercial products to its own users that substitute” for the outlet “without permission or remuneration.” The lawsuit specifically targets Perplexity’s RAG-based products, including its chatbots and Comet browser AI assistant, which gather information from websites to generate responses.

A Times spokesperson stated that “RAG allows Perplexity to crawl the internet and steal content from behind our paywall and deliver it to its customers in real time.” The suit also claims Perplexity’s search engine has hallucinated information and falsely attributed it to the Times, damaging its brand.

Perplexity’s Response

Perplexity has attempted to address compensation concerns through its Publishers’ Program, which offers outlets like Fortune and the Los Angeles Times a share of ad revenue. The company also launched Comet Plus, allocating 80% of its subscription fee to participating publishers.

Perplexity’s head of communications responded: “Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media, and now AI.”

The lawsuit adds to mounting pressure on Perplexity, which faces similar claims from News Corp, Encyclopedia Britannica, Nikkei, and Reddit. The Times has also been pursuing OpenAI and Microsoft in a separate case over AI training data.

Looking Forward

The outcome could shape how AI companies must approach content licensing. The Times has shown willingness to work with companies that compensate fairly, having struck a multi-year deal with Amazon to license content for AI training.

Source: TechCrunch

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