The New York Times Sues Perplexity AI for Copyright Infringement, Alleging Unfair Competition

The New York Times has opened a new front in the legal war between legacy media and artificial intelligence, filing a lawsuit against the AI search startup Perplexity on Friday, December 5, 2025. The suit alleges that the company has illegally copied, distributed, and profited from millions of the newspaper’s copyrighted articles without permission or payment.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses Perplexity of engaging in "massive copyright infringement" to build its competing "answer engine." It claims the startup’s business model is built on "free-riding" on the Times' journalism to create a product that effectively substitutes for the newspaper itself.

"Verbatim" Copying and Hallucinations
Central to the complaint is the accusation that Perplexity’s retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system does not merely "read" the news but actively reproduces it.

The Times alleges that Perplexity’s chatbot often provides "verbatim or near-verbatim" excerpts of its articles—including content hidden behind the newspaper’s strict paywall. By offering detailed summaries and direct quotes, the lawsuit argues, Perplexity removes the need for users to click through to the original source, thereby depriving the publisher of vital subscription and advertising revenue.

Furthermore, the Times is suing for trademark violations under the Lanham Act. The filing claims that Perplexity’s AI frequently "hallucinates"—fabricating false information and attributing it to The New York Times, often while displaying the paper’s logo. This, the publisher argues, damages its reputation for accuracy and trust.

Ignoring Warnings
The lawsuit reveals that legal tensions have been simmering for over a year. The Times states that it sent cease-and-desist letters to Perplexity in October 2024 and July 2025, demanding the startup stop scraping its content.

Despite these warnings and the implementation of technical blocks (such as robots.txt protocols) to prevent web crawlers from accessing its site, the Times alleges that Perplexity continued to ingest its reporting surreptitiously.

A Broader Industry Fight
This lawsuit marks a significant escalation for Perplexity, which is backed by tech heavyweights including Jeff Bezos and Nvidia. While the company has previously positioned itself as a "publisher-friendly" alternative to traditional search engines—even launching a revenue-sharing program for some partners—it now faces the same legal fury that OpenAI and Microsoft have faced from the publishing world.

Other major publishers, including the Chicago Tribune and Dow Jones (parent company of the Wall Street Journal), have recently filed similar suits against Perplexity.

Perplexity has not yet issued a formal response to Friday’s filing, though its leadership has previously denied scraping data for model training, insisting its engine merely indexes the web to provide factual citations. However, with the Times now seeking statutory damages and a permanent injunction to stop the use of its content, that defense will face its toughest test yet in federal court