Britannica and Merriam-Webster sue Perplexity for copyright infringement

Encyclopaedia Britannica and its sister company Merriam-Webster sued Perplexity in a New York federal court, alleging that the AI search company’s “answer engine” reproduced their encyclopaedia and dictionary content, often close to verbatim, without a licence. The complaint said Perplexity’s outputs diverted readers and revenue away from Britannica’s and Merriam-Webster’s own sites by presenting summarised versions of their material directly in search results rather than sending users to the source.

Alongside the copyright claims, the suit made a trademark argument distinctive among the wave of publisher litigation against AI companies that year: that Perplexity’s chatbot sometimes generated factually wrong or fabricated answers and attributed them to Britannica or Merriam-Webster by name, which the companies said risked damaging brands built on decades of editorial accuracy and fact-checking. Britannica’s chief executive, Jorge Cauz, argued that Perplexity styled itself the “world’s first answer engine” while the answers it gave were frequently Britannica’s own, repackaged without credit or payment.

The suit was one of several copyright actions publishers brought against Perplexity over 2025, a docket that grew in the following months to include Reddit and, by December, the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times. It arrived days after reports that the company had closed a $200 million funding round valuing it at $20 billion, juxtaposing rising investor confidence in Perplexity’s growth with mounting legal exposure over how that growth was generated.