The New York Times (NYT) filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Perplexity AI in early December, accusing the generative artificial intelligence (Gen-AI) startup of systematically copying millions of its articles to fuel its AI search engine.
This copyright case marks the latest update in publishers’ war against gen-AI companies, coming months after OpenAI was ordered by a federal judge to release internal files in a Copyright case also brought forward by the NYT.
The lawsuit, lodged in a federal court in New York, details how Perplexity’s technology scrapes paywalled content, indexes it without permission, and spits out “verbatim or near-verbatim” reproductions in responses to user queries.
The NYT Perplexity lawsuit calls into question Perplexity’s retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system, which pulls live web data to generate answers rather than relying solely on pre-trained models.
It breaks this down into two clear stages of infringement. First, web crawlers crawl up articles from NYT and other publishing platforms, including premium content behind subscription walls, and store them in massive internal indexes.
Second, when users ask about current events, Perplexity delivers responses laced with direct excerpts from those articles, often bypassing the need to visit the original site. “Perplexity provides commercial products to its own users that substitute for The Times, without permission or remuneration,” the suit stated.
The economic damage feels immediate and tangible. The widely known publishing platform also argues that Perplexity undercuts their subscription model by handing out journalism for free, diverting readers who might otherwise click through, view ads, or pay for access.
Additionally, the suit makes note of Perplexity AI fabricating quotes and stories, alluding it to the widely known “hallucinations” associated with AI-powered chatbots, while still falsely attributing the false stories to the Times, contributing to an erosion of trust in the brand.
A Growing Publisher Backlash
Perplexity, valued at around $20 billion and processing over 100 million queries weekly, now faces a roster of legal challengers. For example, The Chicago Tribune’s December 2025 filing mirrors the Times’ claims, with evidence showing Perplexity delivering full Tribune articles verbatim despite earlier assurances from the company that it only used “non-verbatim factual summaries.”
Additionally, Dow Jones, parent company of The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and other publishing companies, sued Perplexity last year, accusing the startup of both input-stage scraping and output-stage copying.
Overseas, Japan’s Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun are seeking $15 million each for similar violations, while Encyclopedia Britannica, Wired, Forbes, and the BBC have issued threats or documented the same copying incidents. Even Reddit sued the gen-AI startup in October this year, accusing Perplexity for “industrial-scale” theft of user comments by dodging anti-scraping measures.
More importantly, this recent lawsuit against Perplexity builds on NYT’s high-profile 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, but even Perplexity’s RAG approach adds a twist. Unlike static training data, RAG indexes the live web continuously, raising questions about whether providing citations excuses the copying.
Perplexity Pushes Back with Fair Use and Deals
Perplexity hasn’t filed a full response yet, but its communications head, Jesse Dwyer, called the NYT’s case “an unsuccessful tactic used by publishers against emerging technologies.” The company touts the fair use doctrine, arguing it indexes public web pages like any search engine and always cites sources with the aim of transforming content into helpful answers without storing it permanently for training.
The AI startup also claims to challenge Google’s link-based model by delivering direct answers, however, it still stands as a move that attracts users but alarms content creators.
Perplexity then rolled out a Publisher Program with a $42.5 million revenue pool, sharing 80% of certain subscription fees based on citations, visits via its Comet browser, and content usage. Partners include USA TODAY, Fortune, Getty Images, and Wiley.
How This NYT Perplexity Lawsuit Reshapes Tech and Media
For publishers, the stakes involve survival. International publishing companies rely on subscriptions and traffic after decades of ad-market erosion, especially as AI summaries do both without compensation.
Discovery lies ahead, where Perplexity’s indexes and crawler logs will face scrutiny. If courts side with publishers, there will be mandatory licensing that will cascade across the entire writing-for-publishing industry.
However, if the fair use argument holds, gen-AI startups gain freer rein on the wide web. Either way, the lawsuit forces everyone to rethink value in an era where machines read faster than humans, and often for immense capitalistic profit.
