NYT and Tribune Sue Perplexity AI Over Alleged Content Theft
The New York Times and Chicago Tribune have filed lawsuits against Perplexity AI, accusing the company of large-scale unauthorized use of copyrighted content. The publications allege that Perplexity's AI-driven search engine reproduces full articles, bypassing paywalls and depriving them of subscription and advertising revenue.
At the heart of the dispute is Perplexity's use of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technology, which scrapes protected content to generate verbatim responses. The Tribune claims this practice directly undermines its business model while allowing Perplexity to profit from others' journalistic work.
Perplexity's communications head Jesse Dwyer dismissed the claims as reminiscent of historical resistance to new technologies, from radio to social media. The outcome could set important precedents for AI's use of copyrighted material in training data and real-time operations.
