New York Times Sues Perplexity AI Over Unauthorized Use of Articles
On December 5, 2025, the New York Times filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, accusing the company of illegally copying millions of articles, including paywalled content, without permission. The Times alleges that Perplexity scraped, distributed, and displayed journalists' work to power its generative AI products, violating copyrights.
The lawsuit also cites Lanham Act trademark infringement, claiming that AI-generated content can hallucinate and be falsely attributed to the New York Times when shown alongside its trademarks. Perplexity AI's business model reportedly relies on scraping and copying content from publishers.
Perplexity faces similar legal actions from Dow Jones and the New York Post, while other publishers such as Forbes and Wired have accused the company of plagiarism. Earlier this year, Cloudflare accused Perplexity of concealing its web-crawling activities and scraping sites without permission.
Additional lawsuits include Reddit's October 2025 suit in New York federal court alleging data scraping for AI training and Amazon's November 2025 suit related to Perplexity's AI shopping feature.
Perplexity AI has raised approximately $1.5 billion over three years, including a $200 million funding round in September, with investors like Nvidia and Jeff Bezos.
This case is part of a broader conflict between publishers and technology firms concerning the unauthorized use of copyrighted content to train artificial intelligence systems.
