New York Times sues Perplexity for copyright infringement
The suit, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleged near-verbatim reproduction of Times articles and separately accused Perplexity of fabricating claims falsely attributed to the paper.
- Courts & copyright
- Notable
The New York Times sued Perplexity for copyright infringement, its second lawsuit against an AI company after its December 2023 case against OpenAI and Microsoft, and filed one day after Tribune Publishing and MediaNews Group sued Perplexity on similar grounds.
The complaint alleged that Perplexity’s retrieval-augmented search product substituted for the Times’s own journalism, gathering information from Times pages and returning written responses that reproduced article text verbatim or near-verbatim. It separately alleged that Perplexity’s product had fabricated claims and falsely attributed them to the Times, damaging the paper’s reputation. The Times asked the court to order Perplexity to pay damages and to stop using its content.
The suit followed roughly a year and a half of licensing talks between the Times and Perplexity that had not produced a deal, according to reporting. The Times had meanwhile struck licensing agreements with other AI companies, including a multi-year deal with Amazon earlier in 2025. By early December, Perplexity also faced suits or public disputes with News Corp titles, Encyclopedia Britannica, Merriam-Webster, Nikkei, Asahi Shimbun, Reddit and the Chicago Tribune, making it, alongside OpenAI, one of the AI companies most exposed to publisher litigation over how it acquires and reuses news content.