The New York Times filed a lawsuit on Friday against AI search startup Perplexity, accusing it of copyright infringement—marking the newspaper’s second legal action against an AI company. The Times has now joined a growing coalition of media outlets, including the Chicago Tribune, which also sued Perplexity earlier this week.
The lawsuit alleges that “Perplexity’s commercial products offered to its users substitute for The New York Times’ content without permission or compensation.”
This legal move—despite ongoing negotiations between multiple publishers, including The Times, and AI firms—is part of a broader, years-long strategy. Recognizing that the AI wave cannot be stopped, publishers are leveraging litigation as a bargaining tool to compel AI companies to formally license content, thereby compensating creators and preserving the economic viability of original journalism.
Perplexity has attempted to address these compensation demands by launching a Publisher Program, which shares ad revenue with participating outlets such as Gannett, TIME, Fortune, and the Los Angeles Times. In August, the company introduced Comet Plus, allocating 80% of its $5 monthly subscription fee to enrolled publishers, and recently secured a multi-year licensing agreement with Getty Images.
“While we believe in the ethical and responsible development and use of AI, we firmly oppose Perplexity’s unauthorized use of our content to build and promote its products,” said Graham James, a spokesperson for The New York Times, in a statement. “We will continue to hold accountable those companies that refuse to recognize the value of our work.”
Mirroring the Tribune’s complaint, The Times challenges Perplexity’s method of generating answers to user queries through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems—such as its chatbot and Comet browser AI assistant—by scraping information from websites and databases.
“Perplexity then repackages the original content in written responses to users,” the lawsuit states. “These outputs are often verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, summaries, or abridgments of copyrighted works, including those of The New York Times.”
As James emphasized in the statement, “RAG enables Perplexity to crawl the internet and steal content from behind our paywall, delivering it in real time to its customers. That content should be accessible only to our paying subscribers.”
The Times also contends that Perplexity’s search engine has fabricated information and falsely attributed it to the publication, damaging its brand reputation.
“Publishers have been suing new technology companies for over a century—from radio and television to the internet, social media, and now AI,” Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity’s head of communications, told TechCrunch. “Fortunately, it’s never worked—if it had, we’d still be debating this over telegraph.”
(Publishers have, at times, won or influenced landmark legal battles over emerging technologies, resulting in settlements, licensing frameworks, and judicial precedents.)
The lawsuit follows more than a year after The New York Times sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter demanding it stop using the paper’s content for summarization and other outputs. The publication claims it reached out to Perplexity multiple times over the past 18 months, insisting it halt the use of its material unless a formal agreement was reached.
This is not The Times’ first clash with an AI firm. The newspaper also sued OpenAI and its backer Microsoft, alleging that both companies used millions of its articles to train their AI systems without compensation. OpenAI countered that its use of publicly available data for AI training constitutes “fair use” and even accused The Times of manipulating ChatGPT to fabricate evidence.
That case remains ongoing, but a similar lawsuit against OpenAI rival Anthropic may soon set a precedent regarding the fair use of AI training data. In that suit, authors and publishers alleged that AI firms trained models using pirated books. The court ruled that while legally acquired books might qualify as fair use, pirated copies clearly infringe copyright. Anthropic subsequently agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement.
The New York Times’ lawsuit intensifies the legal pressure on Perplexity. Last year, News Corp—which owns The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and the New York Post—filed similar allegations. By 2025, the list of plaintiffs has expanded to include Encyclopædia Britannica, Merriam-Webster, Nikkei, Asahi Shimbun, and Reddit.
Other media organizations, including Wired and Forbes, have also accused Perplexity of plagiarism and unethical web scraping—specifically targeting sites that explicitly prohibit crawling. Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure provider, recently confirmed these scraping practices.
In its complaint, The New York Times is seeking damages for the harm caused and a court order to permanently block Perplexity from using its content.
Notably, The Times is not opposed to partnering with AI companies that fairly compensate its journalists. Earlier this year, it struck a multi-year deal with Amazon to license its content for training the tech giant’s AI models. Several other publishers have similarly entered into licensing agreements with AI firms—for both model training and inclusion in chatbot responses. OpenAI, for instance, has deals with the Associated Press, Axel Springer, Vox Media, The Atlantic, and others.
