The New York Times sued Perplexity AI for repeatedly violating its copyrights by using the publication's content without permission to generate responses and compete with The Times' offerings.
The New York Times filed a lawsuit in federal court in New York against Perplexity, an AI startup founded in 2022 by a former OpenAI engineer that operates a search engine powered by similar technology to ChatGPT. The lawsuit alleges that Perplexity repeatedly violated The Times's copyrights over the past 18 months despite multiple demands to stop using the publication's content until a licensing agreement could be negotiated. The suit claims Perplexity's search engine retrieves information from websites and uses that information to generate text responses to user queries, sometimes grabbing large chunks or entire articles from The Times. The lawsuit argues this creates commercial products that substitute for The Times without permission or compensation. Additionally, The Times accused Perplexity of damaging its brand by sometimes generating false information through AI 'hallucination' and incorrectly attributing that misinformation to The Times. This lawsuit is part of a growing legal battle with over 40 copyright cases filed against AI companies across the country. Perplexity's head of communication responded that publishers have historically sued new technology companies without success.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI systems capable of creating economic or cultural value, including through reproduction of human innovation or creativity (e.g., art, music, writing, coding, invention), destabilizing economic and social systems that rely on human effort. The ubiquity of AI-generated content may lead to reduced appreciation for human skills, disruption of creative and knowledge-based industries, and homogenization of cultural experiences.
AI system
Due to a decision or action made by an AI system
Intentional
Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed