The New York Times filed a lawsuit on Friday against artificial intelligence search startup Perplexity for copyright infringement, its second lawsuit against an artificial intelligence company. The Times joins several media outlets that have sued Perplexity, including the Chicago Tribune, which also filed suit this week.
The Times’ lawsuit alleges that “Perplexity provides commercial products to its own users that act as substitutes” for the store, “without permission or compensation.”
The lawsuit — filed even as several publishers, including The Times, are negotiating deals with AI companies — is part of the same, ongoing, multi-year strategy. Recognizing that the AI tide cannot be stopped, publishers are using lawsuits as leverage in negotiations in hopes of forcing AI companies to formally license content in ways that compensate creators and preserve the economic viability of original journalism.
Perplexity sought to address compensation claims by launching a Publisher Program last year, which offers participating outlets such as Gannett, TIME, Fortune and the Los Angeles Times a share of ad revenue. In August, Perplexity also launched Comet Plus, making 80% of the $5 monthly fee available to participating publishers, and recently closed a multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images.
“While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of artificial intelligence, we strongly oppose Perplexity’s use of our content without permission to develop and promote their products,” said Graham James, a spokesman for The Times. “We will continue to work to hold companies accountable that refuse to recognize the value of our work.”
Similar to the Tribune’s suit, the Times takes issue with Perplexity’s method of answering user queries by gathering information from websites and databases to generate answers through its retrieval augmented generation (RAG) products, such as chatbots and the artificial intelligence browser assistant Comet.
“Perplexity then repackages the original content into written responses to users,” the suit states. “These responses or results are often verbatim or near verbatim reproductions, summaries, or abridgements of original content, including Times copyrighted works.”
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Or, as James put it in his statement, “RAG allows Perplexity to crawl the web and steal content behind our paywall and deliver it to their customers in real time. This content should only be accessible to paying subscribers.”
The Times also claims that Perplexity’s search engine is delusional and has falsely attributed them to the store, which is damaging its brand.
“Publishers have been suing new technology companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media and now artificial intelligence,” Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity’s chief communications officer, told TechCrunch. “Thankfully it never worked, or we’d all be talking about it by telegram.”
(Publishers have, from time to time, won or settled significant legal battles over new technologies, resulting in settlements, licensing regimesand judicial precedents.)
The lawsuit comes a little more than a year after the Times sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter demanding that it stop using its content for summaries and other effects. The store claims to have contacted Perplexity numerous times over the past 18 months to stop using its content unless a settlement could be negotiated.
This isn’t the first battle the Times has picked with an AI company. The Times is also suing OpenAI and its backer Microsoft, alleging that the two trained their AI systems on millions of the store’s articles without offering compensation. OpenAI has argued that using the publicly available data for AI training constitutes “fair use” and has filed its own accusations against the Times, alleging that the outlet manipulated ChatGPT to find evidence.
That case is still ongoing, but a similar lawsuit against OpenAI’s competitor, Anthropic, could set a precedent for fair use for training AI systems in the future. In that lawsuit, in which authors and publishers sued the AI company for using pirated books to train its models, the court ruled that while legally obtained books may be a safe application of fair use, pirated ones violate copyright. Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement.
The Times’ lawsuit adds to mounting legal pressure on Perplexity. Last year, News Corp – which owns outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and the New York Post – made similar allegations against Perplexity. This list grew in 2025 to also include Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster, Nikkei, Asahi Shimbun, and Reddit.
Other outlets, including Wired and Forbes, have accused Perplexity of plagiarism and unethically crawling and scraping content from sites that have explicitly said they don’t want it taken down. The latter claim is one recently confirmed by internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare.
In its lawsuit, the Times is asking the courts to make Perplexity pay for the damage it allegedly caused and to bar the startup from continuing to use its content.
The Times is clearly not above working with AI companies that compensate for the work of its reporters. The store earlier this year struck a multi-year deal with Amazon to license its content to train the tech giant’s artificial intelligence models. Several other publishers and media companies have signed licensing agreements with AI companies to use their content for training and to appear in chatbot responses. OpenAI has signed deals with Associated Press, Axel Springer, Vox Media, The Atlantic and more.
This article has been updated with comments from Perplexity.
