The New York Times filed suit on Friday against AI search startup Perplexity for copyright infringement. This marks the second lawsuit The Times has brought against an AI company. They join several other media outlets currently suing Perplexity, including the Chicago Tribune, which also filed suit this week.
The lawsuit from The Times claims that Perplexity provides commercial products to its users that substitute for the outlet without permission or payment. This legal action, filed even as several publishers negotiate deals with AI firms, is part of an ongoing, years-long strategy. Recognizing the rise of AI is inevitable, publishers use lawsuits as leverage in negotiations. Their goal is to force AI companies to formally license content in ways that compensate creators and support the economic viability of original journalism.
Perplexity has attempted to address compensation demands. Last year, it launched a Publishers’ Program, which offers participating outlets like Gannett, TIME, Fortune, and the Los Angeles Times a share of ad revenue. In August, Perplexity launched Comet Plus, allocating eighty percent of its five-dollar monthly fee to participating publishers. The company also recently struck a multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images.
A spokesperson for The Times, Graham James, stated that while the outlet believes in the ethical use of AI, it firmly objects to Perplexity’s unlicensed use of its content to develop and promote their products. He said The Times will continue to work to hold companies accountable that refuse to recognize the value of their work.
Similar to the Tribune’s suit, The Times takes issue with Perplexity’s method for answering user queries. The company gathers information from websites and databases to generate responses via its retrieval-augmented generation products, like its chatbots and Comet browser AI assistant. The suit states that Perplexity repackages the original content in written responses to users. Those responses are often verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, summaries, or abridgments of the original content, including The Times’s copyrighted works.
As James put it, the technology allows Perplexity to crawl the internet and take content from behind their paywall and deliver it to its customers in real time. He asserts that content should only be accessible to paying subscribers. The Times also claims Perplexity’s search engine has hallucinated information and falsely attributed it to the outlet, which damages its brand.
In response, Perplexity’s head of communications, Jesse Dwyer, noted that publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media, and now AI. He remarked that fortunately it has never worked, or we would all be talking about this by telegraph. It is worth noting that publishers have, at times, won or shaped major legal battles over new technologies, resulting in settlements, licensing regimes, and court precedents.
This lawsuit comes just over a year after The Times sent a cease and desist letter to Perplexity demanding it stop using its content for summaries and other output. The outlet claims it has contacted Perplexity several times over the past eighteen months to stop using its content unless an agreement could be negotiated.
This is not the first fight The Times has picked with an AI firm. The outlet is also suing OpenAI and its backer Microsoft, claiming the two trained their AI systems with millions of its articles without offering compensation. OpenAI has argued that its use of publicly available data for AI training constitutes fair use, and has made its own accusations against The Times, claiming the outlet manipulated ChatGPT to find evidence. That case is still ongoing.
A similar lawsuit directed against OpenAI competitor Anthropic could set a precedent regarding fair use for training AI systems. In that suit, where authors and publishers sued the AI firm for using pirated books to train its models, the court ruled that while lawfully acquired books might be a safe fair use application, pirated ones infringe on copyrights. Anthropic agreed to a one-point-five billion dollar settlement.
The Times’ lawsuit adds to mounting legal pressure on Perplexity. Last year, News Corp, which owns outlets like The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and the New York Post, made similar claims against Perplexity. That 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 websites that have explicitly indicated they do not want to be scraped. The latter claim is one that internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare recently confirmed.
In its suit, The Times is asking the courts to make Perplexity pay for the harm allegedly caused and to ban the startup from continuing to use its content.
The Times is clearly not above working with AI firms that compensate for its reporters’ work. The outlet earlier this year struck a multi-year deal with Amazon to license its content to train the tech giant’s AI models. Several other publishers and media companies have signed licensing deals with AI firms to use their content for training and to feature in chatbot responses. OpenAI has inked deals with Associated Press, Axel Springer, Vox Media, The Atlantic, and more.