News Corp., the publisher behind Dow Jones, the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, is suing Perplexity AI over copyright infringement.
In the suit filed Monday, News Corp. accused Perplexity of using copyright News Corp. content to train its artificial intelligence model. Perplexity’s AI chatbot allegedly reproduces content from News Corp. publications in its responses, sometimes verbatim, and doesn’t credit or link back to the source.
“Its AI ’answer engine’ copies on a massive scale, among other things, copyright news content, analysis and opinion as inputs into its internal database,” the complaint reads. “It then uses that copyright content to generate responses to users’ queries that are intended to and do act as a substitute for news and other information websites.”
Perplexity couldn’t be reached for comment.
The complaint also claims that News Corp. sent a letter to Perplexity this year bringing up similar issues and even offering a possible partnership, but the letter was not answered.
News Corp. signed a licensing deal with OpenAI earlier this year, which let the company train its AI chatbots on copyright content from the publisher. News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson praised OpenAI for its comparative transparency this week.
“We applaud principled companies like OpenAI, which understands that integrity and creativity are essential if we are to realize the potential of artificial intelligence,” Mr. Thompson said in a statement. “Perplexity is not the only AI company abusing intellectual property, and it is not the only AI company that we will pursue with vigor and rigor.”
This week’s suit is the second legal complaint Perplexity has faced this month. Earlier in October, The New York Times issued a cease and desist letter to Perplexity, accusing the company of illegally scraping paywalled content to train its AI models.
“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 read.
• Vaughn Cockayne can be reached at vcockayne@washingtontimes.com.
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