The New York Times has taken its fight against Perplexity to a new level, filing a lawsuit in federal court that accuses the fast-growing AI startup of systematically lifting, reproducing, and monetizing the newspaper’s journalism without permission.
The complaint, submitted Friday in the Southern District of New York, alleges that Perplexity “unlawfully crawls, scrapes, copies, and distributes” Times content — often in forms that the Times says are either verbatim reproductions or so close that they function as substitutes for the original work. The lawsuit says the Times repeatedly warned Perplexity to stop, issuing cease-and-desist letters last year and again in July, but the company allegedly continued the practice.
The accusation arrives after months of scrutiny from news outlets whose paywalled reporting has been turning up inside Perplexity’s summaries. Investigations by Forbes and Wired earlier this year found that the startup’s systems had been bypassing standard protections — including the industry-accepted robots.txt file — to harvest material behind paywalls.
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The Times is making the same claim, arguing that Perplexity’s crawlers “intentionally ignored or evaded technical content protection measures” that publishers use to control which parts of their sites automated tools can access.
The paper argues that the consequences are direct and measurable: if Perplexity delivers Times reporting to users in ready-made form, the user no longer needs to subscribe, click through, or visit the Times website. That, the lawsuit says, undercuts the revenue streams the outlet depends on — subscription, advertising, licensing, and affiliate income — all while Perplexity positions the appropriated content inside a for-profit AI product.
Perplexity, founded in 2022, markets itself as an “answer engine” built on generative AI. Its pitch is simple: instead of searching, you ask questions, and the system produces a consolidated answer drawn from the web. The model has gained traction quickly, attracting investors and positioning itself as a challenger to ChatGPT and Google’s AI search experiments. That rise has also meant increasing friction with publishers who believe Perplexity is building a business on other people’s work.
The lawsuit lands amid a broader wave of legal pressure on the startup ecosystem. One day before the Times filed its case, the Chicago Tribune brought its own copyright lawsuit against Perplexity, also accusing the company of bypassing paywalls and repackaging its content. More broadly, the Times itself is no stranger to legal battles with AI firms: it sued OpenAI in December 2023 over similar claims, before eventually reaching a licensing deal that allows Amazon to bring Times content to products like Alexa.
The legal landscape around AI training and output remains unsettled. Major AI firms argue that scraping publicly available content is protected under fair use, and that generated summaries are distinct creative outputs. News publishers counter that AI systems powered by their articles are siphoning off their audience and financially undermining the journalism that AI companies rely on.
Perplexity has attempted in recent months to show publishers it wants a cooperative relationship, launching a revenue-sharing program last year and later expanding it to include its Comet web browser in August. But the Times says the startup’s current practices still amount to unauthorized copying.
“By copying The Times’s copyrighted content and creating substitutive output derived from its works, obviating the need for users to visit The Times’s website or purchase its newspaper, Perplexity is misappropriating substantial subscription, advertising, licensing, and affiliate revenue opportunities that belong rightfully and exclusively to The Times,” the complaint states.
Perplexity pushed back in a statement sent to The Verge. Spokesperson Jesse Dwyer said: “Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media and now AI. Fortunately it’s never worked, or we’d all be talking about this by telegraph.”
The Times is seeking damages and a permanent injunction that would bar Perplexity from what it describes as unlawful scraping and redistribution of its journalism. What the federal court decides could set one of the most consequential precedents yet in the standoff between generative AI companies and the news industry — a conflict that now stretches from OpenAI to Google, xAI, and a long list of AI upstarts whose systems rely on the work of reporters they neither employ nor pay.