New York Times Sues Perplexity AI in Latest IP Case Against GenAI Companies

On December 5, The New York Times Company (the Times) filed a complaint for copyright and trademark infringement against Perplexity AI, Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, adding another major lawsuit to the growing wave of litigation against generative artificial intelligence (AI) companies.

The Times alleged in its filing that Perplexity engaged in “large-scale, unlawful copying and distribution” of millions of its articles to build its AI-powered “answer engine.” The complaint argued that Perplexity’s products directly substitute for the newspaper’s own content, thereby undermining its business and devaluing its journalism. Perplexity’s conduct “threatens this legacy and impedes the free press’s ability to continue playing its role in supporting an informed citizenry and a healthy democracy,” the Times argued.

The complaint detailed a two-stage infringement process where the Times argued that Perplexity unlawfully used software crawlers, including “PerplexityBot” and “Perplexity-User,” to scrape and copy vast amounts of content from nytimes.com. According to the filing, Perplexity intentionally ignored the Robots Exclusion Protocol (robots.txt), a standard used to manage web crawlers, and even circumvented a “hard-block” implemented by the newspaper. The Times noted that Perplexity made over 175,000 attempts to access the site in August 2025 alone.

Furthermore, the complaint asserted that Perplexity’s GenAI Products generate responses that are “identical or substantially similar” to The Times’ original content. These outputs, described as “verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, summaries, or abridgements,” provide users with comprehensive answers that eliminate the need to visit the source article. The filing noted that these reproductions “go far beyond the snippets typically shown with ordinary search results,” and that even when Perplexity’s outputs include links to source materials, users have less need to navigate to those sources because the expressive content is already quoted or paraphrased in the response.

As one example, the filing showed how a query about a New York Times article titled “Did a Brooklyn Couple Kill a Neighbor’s Trees for a Better View in Maine?” resulted in a chatbot response that was “substantially similar” to the original text. Another example demonstrated that Perplexity’s chatbot copied recommendations, reasoning and photographs from a Wirecutter article on “The Best Slippers,” creating a direct substitute for the original review. According to the filing, this infringing output would not be possible without Perplexity’s accessing and copying The Times’ content and using it as input in Perplexity’s retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) process.

In addition to the copyright claims, the complaint alleged significant trademark violations under the Lanham Act. The Times argued that Perplexity’s products generate fabricated information, or “hallucinations,” and falsely attribute them to the Times by displaying the newspaper’s registered trademarks alongside the false content. This practice, the complaint contended, constitutes a false designation of origin that is likely to confuse users and tarnish the newspaper’s reputation for accuracy. The filing also accused Perplexity of creating misleadingly incomplete reproductions of its content without disclosure.

The Times is pursuing relief on five counts, including direct copyright infringement for Perplexity’s creation of both inputs and outputs, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, false designation of origin and trademark dilution, and trademark infringement. Additionally, The Times seeks statutory and actual damages, the disgorgement of profits, and a permanent injunction to stop Perplexity’s alleged infringing activities.

The action is the latest in a series of more than 50 copyright-related suits filed in the United States against AI developers, which plaintiffs allege have built profitable models using unauthorized uses of protected works. In September 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle Bartz v. Anthropic, in which authors alleged that the AI company trained its models on hundreds of thousands of pirated books, in what the plaintiffs called “the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history.” In October 2025, Reddit filed a suit against Perplexity for allegedly bypassing its security measures to scrape user-generated content, which Perplexity had admitted was a “top-tier source” for its data.

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