The New York Times just dropped another bombshell in the AI copyright wars, filing suit against Perplexity for allegedly stealing its content and serving it to users without compensation. The lawsuit marks the Times' second major legal battle with an AI company and adds to mounting pressure on the search startup that's already facing suits from multiple publishers.
The media industry's legal assault on AI companies just got a major reinforcement. The New York Times filed suit Friday against AI search startup Perplexity for copyright infringement, joining the Chicago Tribune in what's becoming a coordinated legal campaign against the buzzy AI company.
The timing isn't coincidental. Publishers are wielding lawsuits as leverage in licensing negotiations, recognizing they can't stop the AI revolution but demanding compensation for their content. "We firmly object to Perplexity's unlicensed use of our content to develop and promote their products," Graham James, a Times spokesperson, said in a statement to TechCrunch.
The lawsuit zeroes in on Perplexity's core technology - its retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system that crawls websites and databases to answer user queries. The Times claims this results in "verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, summaries, or abridgments" of its copyrighted work, essentially creating a substitute product without permission or payment.
What's particularly damaging to Perplexity's defense is the paywall issue. "RAG allows Perplexity to crawl the internet and steal content from behind our paywall and deliver it to its customers in real time," James explained. "That content should only be accessible to our paying subscribers." This cuts to the heart of publishers' business models - if AI companies can freely distribute paywalled content, subscription revenues collapse.
Perplexity has tried to address these concerns proactively. The company launched a Publishers' Program last year, offering participating outlets like Gannett, TIME, and Fortune a share of ad revenue. In August, it introduced Comet Plus, allocating 80% of its $5 monthly fee to participating publishers. The startup also struck a multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images in October.
But these efforts haven't satisfied major publishers. The legal pressure is mounting rapidly - News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, filed similar claims last year. The 2025 wave includes Encyclopedia Britannica, Merriam-Webster, Nikkei, Asahi Shimbun, and even .
