Perplexity AI Faces Major Lawsuit from Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster Over Content Scraping

Tech giant Perplexity AI gets hit with a landmark copyright lawsuit—pitting AI innovation against traditional publishing giants.

Legal Showdown Begins

Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster jointly filed suit against the AI startup, alleging unauthorized scraping of proprietary content. The case represents one of the most significant legal challenges to AI training practices to date.

Content Under Fire

The publishers claim Perplexity systematically harvested copyrighted material without compensation or permission. Their legal team argues this constitutes massive-scale intellectual property theft disguised as machine learning.

Industry Implications

This lawsuit could set precedent for how AI companies source training data—and whether they can continue treating the entire internet as their free content buffet. Legacy publishers finally drawing the line against tech's 'move fast and break things' mentality.

Financial Fallout

While Perplexity's valuation might take a hit, at least they're not another crypto project promising AI integration while actually just running a GPT wrapper and calling it innovation. Some things are actually worth suing over.

Britannica: Perplexity plagiarism diverts internet traffic

The plaintiffs shared some snapshots of Perplexity’s definition of the word plagiarism that appeared identical to Merriam-Webster’s entry. 

According to the complaint, Perplexity’s “answer engine” does not act as a neutral search engine but instead “free rides” on the investment of publishers. Traditional search engines such as Google direct users to third-party websites, allowing publishers to earn revenue from subscriptions and advertising. 

“Web publishers like Plaintiffs rely on those clicks to sell subscriptions to users who seek to delve more deeply into some content, as well as selling advertising to third parties who seek to present their products or services before the publishers’ users,” the lawsuit surmised.

But as the complaint puts it, Perplexity “hijacks” this traffic by summarizing copyrighted articles directly in its responses. The publishers insist this practice reduces their ability to sell subscriptions and advertising, cutting out the business models funding for their editorial and reference work.

Perplexity AI describes its product as an advanced search tool that uses real-time web crawling to gather and condense information. The company advertises its service as concise, conversational summaries based on “top-tier sources.”

“When you ask Perplexity a question, it uses advanced AI to search the internet in real time, gathering insights from top-tier sources,” the company explains on its website, according to the lawsuit. “It then distills this information into a clear, concise summary, delivering exactly what you need in an easy-to-understand, conversational tone.”

Britannica and Merriam-Webster argue that this marketing confirms their accusations, which is “cannibalizing traffic” to their platforms by reproducing material in summaries rather than directing users to the original sources.

The Britannica lawsuit is not the only legal turmoil the AI company is battling, as several other media groups have been in court to challenge its use of their content.

Heaps of legal charges have been sent towards Perplexity, including one from News Corp’s Dow Jones and the New York Post, filed in October 2024. The basis of the query is unauthorized use of published articles in the AI platform’s responses. 

News Corp, parent company of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, has accused it of building up its business at the expense of publishers’ rights. Other media outlets, including Forbes, The New York Times, and the BBC, have also clashed with Perplexity over misappropriation of articles.

Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster are seeking damages for copyright and trademark infringement, along with an injunction to stop Perplexity from reproducing or attaching their names to AI-generated outputs. 

Perplexity’s backers and partnerships

Perplexity has acquired funding from high-profile backers, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The company has also struck partnerships with some publishers willing to test revenue-sharing models.

As reported by Cryptopolitan in late August, the startup set aside $42.5 million in revenue to share with publishers when their content appears on its internet browser, Comet. 

Time magazine and the Los Angeles Times have joined Perplexity’s ad revenue program. While some organizations are quite happy holding hands with the AI institutions, others are worried about losing control over their intellectual property.

Last Monday, the World History Encyclopedia announced the launch of a Perplexity-powered chatbot. The bot uses the encyclopedia’s database of academic sources and articles through conversational AI.

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