The New York Times claimed in a lawsuit on Friday that its copyrights were repeatedly violated by Perplexity, an artificial intelligence start-up that has built a cutting-edge internet search engine.
The Times said in its lawsuit that it had contacted Perplexity several times over the past 18 months, demanding that the start-up stop using the publication’s content until the two companies negotiated an agreement. But Perplexity continued to use The Times’s material.
The suit, filed in federal court in New York, is the latest in a growing legal battle between copyright holders and A.I. companies that includes more than 40 cases around the country. In August 2024, Dow Jones, owner of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and other publications, made similar claims in another lawsuit against Perplexity.
The suit is also the second that The Times has filed against A.I. companies. In December 2023, The Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft, arguing that the companies trained their A.I. systems using millions of articles published by The Times without offering compensation. Microsoft and OpenAI, the maker of the chatbot ChatGPT, have disputed the claims.
Perplexity, a San Francisco company founded in 2022 by a former OpenAI engineer and other entrepreneurs, operates a search engine powered by the same type of A.I. technology that underpins ChatGPT.
The suit accuses Perplexity of violating The Times’s copyrights in several ways, most notably when the start-up’s search engine retrieves information from a website or database and uses that information to generate a piece of text and to respond to queries from internet users. That would not be a fair use of that material, the suit claimed, because Perplexity grabbed large chunks of the publication’s content — in some cases, entire articles — and provided information that directly competed with what The Times offered its readers.
“Perplexity provides commercial products to its own users that substitute for The Times, without permission or remuneration,” the suit said.
The Times also accused Perplexity of damaging its brand. In some cases, the suit said, Perplexity’s search engine made up information — what A.I. researchers call “hallucination” — and falsely attributed that information to The Times.
Perplexity did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Of the more than 40 suits that have been filed by copyright holders against A.I. companies over the past four years, most are still winding their way through the courts. In September, Anthropic, an OpenAI rival, agreed to pay book authors and publishers $1.5 billion after a judge ruled that the company, which is based in San Francisco, had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books as it built its A.I. systems.
In May, The Times struck a multiyear deal with Amazon to license its editorial content for use in the tech giant’s artificial intelligence platforms. It was The Times’s first licensing arrangement involving generative A.I. No financial terms were disclosed.
Amazon will use material from The Times’s food and recipe site as well as content from the publication’s sports site, The Athletic, and Times material will be used to train Amazon’s A.I. models.
Many other news organizations have signed similar deals with A.I. companies, including OpenAI and Microsoft.
Cade Metz is a Times reporter who writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology.
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