AIThe New York Times and Chicago Tribune sue Perplexity over alleged copyright infringementBoth publications claim the AI company scraped their works for LLM training and often reproduced their content verbatim.Kris HoltContributing ReporterFri, December 5, 2025 at 3:36 PM UTCThe and the have filed separate lawsuits against Perplexity over alleged copyright infringement.The said it had sent Perplexity several cease-and-desist demands to stop using its content until the two reached an agreement, but the AI company persisted in doing so.In the lawsuit [PDF], the accused Perplexity of infringing on its copyrights at two main stages.First, by scraping its website (including in real time) to train AI models and feed content into the likes of the Claude chatbot and Comet browser.
Second, in the output of Perplexity's products, with the accusing the company’s generative AI products of often reproducing its articles verbatim.The also says Perplexity damaged its brand by falsely attributing completely fabricated information (aka hallucinations) to the newspaper.The also filed a lawsuit against Perplexity for similar reasons."Perplexity’s genAI products generate outputs that are identical or substantially similar to the Chicago Tribune’s content,” the newspaper claimed in its suit.
“Upon information and belief, Perplexity has unlawfully copied millions of copyrighted stories, videos, images and other works to power its products and tools."AdvertisementAdvertisementThese lawsuits are the latest in dozens of legal cases involving copyright holders and AI companies in the US.The for instance, previously sued OpenAI and Microsoft.It accused the companies of training their large language models on millions of its articles without permission.
That case is ongoing.Copyright holders have licensed their content to AI companies in some cases, though.OpenAI has struck multiple deals with media companies.The and Amazon reached an agreement this year that's said to be worth as much as $25 million per year to the media company.
