The New York Times Sues Perplexity AI: What the Complaint Alleges
The New York Times Company has filed suit against Perplexity AI, claiming the company engaged in “large-scale, unlawful copying and distribution of The Times’s copyrighted content.”
The Times says it filed suit after making multiple requests over 18 months for Perplexity to stop using the newspaper’s content while the companies negotiated a licensing agreement.
In its 61-page complaint, the company describes its journalism and argues that Perplexity’s practices threaten its business model:
For nearly two centuries, The Times has maintained a reputation of excellence by providing independent journalism that is accurate and carefully crafted without fear or favor. The Times’s reputation has been earned through significant, consistent investment in reporting and its journalists. But Perplexity has engaged in illegal conduct that threatens this legacy and impedes the free press’s ability to continue playing its role in supporting an informed citizenry and a healthy democracy.
Key allegations in the lawsuit
The complaint alleges that:
Perplexity violated the protections that intellectual property law provides for The Times’s expressive, original journalism, covering everything from news and opinion to culture, business, cooking, games, shopping recommendations, and sports (collectively, “Times Content”).
The complaint also describes Perplexity’s product and business model as follows:
Perplexity is a generative artificial intelligence (“GenAI”) company that describes its namesake chatbot as an “answer engine.” According to Perplexity, when a user asks a question, it uses AI to search the internet in real time, gather insights from sources, and distill them into a “clear, concise summary.”
The complaint argues that what Perplexity calls “gathering” involves copying publishers’ content, combining it with a large language model (“LLM”), and producing lengthy output derived from copyrighted works. It further claims Perplexity markets this as a way for users to “skip the links,” reducing the need to visit the underlying publisher sites.
[Footnotes omitted.]
Perplexity has also promoted its chatbot as letting users “skip the links” by providing “a single, comprehensive answer that summarizes everything you need to know.”
According to the complaint, Perplexity’s responses to user queries “often are verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, summaries, or abridgments of the original content, including The Times’s copyrighted works.”
The complaint says these alleged copyright violations occur in two main stages:
- Input stage: Perplexity allegedly crawls, scrapes, copies, and distributes Times Content from nytimes.com and third-party platforms using software programs to build a search index.
- Output stage: Perplexity’s outputs are allegedly identical or substantially similar to Times Content.
Trademark and “hallucination” allegations
In addition to copyright claims, the complaint alleges that:
Perplexity violates The Times’s trademarks under the Lanham Act when its GenAI products generate fabricated content (“hallucinations”) and falsely attribute that content to The Times by displaying it alongside The Times’s registered marks. The complaint also alleges trademark violations when Perplexity’s products omit portions of Times Content without disclosing those omissions, while still presenting the results next to The Times’s trademarks—potentially misleading users into believing the output is associated with, sponsored by, or approved by The Times.
Other publisher lawsuits and industry context
Dow Jones (publisher of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post) also filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Perplexity in October 2024. The Chicago Tribune also sued Perplexity in December 2025.
Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity’s head of communications, said in a statement to the Times:
Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media, and now A.I. Fortunately, it’s never worked, or we’d all be talking about this by telegraph.
The Guardian adds that:
Perplexity in particular has become a target of multiple legal disputes and faces similar accusations from a number of publishers as it tries to aggressively build market share in a hyper-competitive market for generative AI tools. Cloudflare, one of the world’s most prominent digital infrastructure companies, accused Perplexity earlier this year of hiding its web-crawling activities and scraping websites without permission—a serious accusation with potential copyright implications. Perplexity denied the allegations.
Cloudflare stated on its blog that customers had reported Perplexity could still access their content even when its bots appeared to be blocked. Cloudflare said it confirmed the Perplexity crawlers were blocked.
Cloudflare also asserted that:
The Internet as we have known it for the past three decades is rapidly changing, but one thing remains constant: it is built on trust. There are clear preferences that crawlers should be transparent, serve a clear purpose, perform a specific activity, and, most importantly, follow website directives and preferences. Based on Perplexity’s observed behavior, which is incompatible with those preferences, we have de-listed them as a verified bot and added heuristics to our managed rules that block this stealth crawling.
Where this fits in the broader AI/copyright landscape
An article in the Times notes that the case is one of more than 40 disputes between copyright holders and GenAI companies.
In September, Anthropic reached a settlement with book authors and publishers after litigation over the use of copyrighted works in AI training.
If the company hadn’t settled, statutory damages could have been far higher, according to Wired.
As we previously blogged:
In Anthropic, the court ruled that training large language models on legally acquired copyrighted books can constitute fair use, but downloading pirated copies for permanent storage violates copyright law.
In 2023, The Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft, alleging they trained AI systems on millions of Times articles without permission or compensation.
In May 2025, the Times agreed to license its content to Amazon to train Amazon’s GenAI models. Other news organizations have signed similar licensing deals with other AI companies.
Conclusion: why this case matters
This lawsuit is about more than one publisher and one chatbot. It tees up a core question for the modern web: when an AI tool can read the internet and give a polished answer in seconds, who gets the credit—and who gets paid—for the reporting that made that answer possible?
What to watch next: whether courts treat AI “search-and-summarize” products more like traditional search engines (which generally show snippets and send traffic out) or more like substitutes for the original work. The outcome could shape how AI companies design their products, how publishers negotiate licensing deals, and even how easily readers can tell what’s sourced, what’s summarized, and what’s simply generated.
