The New York Times sent a cease and desist letter to the Jeff Bezos-backed artificial intelligence platform Perplexity this week, alleging the company is illegally accessing paywalled content to train its model.
According to The Times, Perplexity has accessed the newspaper’s website and backlog of original reporting to improve its business.
“Perplexity and its business partners have been unjustly enriched by using, without authorization, the Times’ expressive, carefully written and researched, and edited journalism without a license,” the letter, first viewed by The Wall Street Journal, reads.
The paper gave Perplexity until the end of this month to respond to its letter. Perplexity has denied that it’s illegally accessing NYT content and said it wants to work with the paper.
Other news outlets have accused Perplexity of illegally using their content as well. Earlier this year, Forbes and Wired accused the platform of scraping their websites for content without permission.
The Times has been one of the more vocal critics of AI companies’ use of copyrighted material to train their models. The paper has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for allegedly using paywalled NYT reporting without consent to train ChatGPT.
Still, other news publishers have gotten into bed with OpenAI, signing multimillion-dollar contracts that let ChatGPT access copyrighted content.
• Vaughn Cockayne can be reached at vcockayne@washingtontimes.com.
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