New York Times sues Perplexity for copyright infringement: Another major lawsuit following Amazon’s “agentic” misconduct allegations

The New York Times has sued Perplexity, accusing the AI search startup of copying and distributing its journalism without permission. The suit, filed Friday in the Southern District of New York, claims Perplexity scraped and reused Times articles, videos, podcasts, and other proprietary material to generate answers for users, sometimes producing responses that look “identical or substantially similar” to original Times content.

The filing lands exactly one month after Amazon accused Perplexity of using its “agentic” shopping assistant to quietly access private customer accounts and disguise automated scraping activity as if a human were browsing. That case is still unfolding, and now Perplexity has another major legal fight added to its stack.

Perplexity Sued: NYT Accuses AI Search Engine Startup of Copying Articles, Podcasts, and Videos

The Times said it supports the responsible development of AI, but argues Perplexity crossed a line by lifting its work without permission or payment.

“While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, we firmly object to Perplexity’s unlicensed use of our content to develop and promote their products,” said Graham James, a spokesperson for The Times. “We will continue to work to hold companies accountable that refuse to recognize the value of our work.”

Perplexity, founded in 2022 by former Google and OpenAI engineers, markets itself as an “answer engine” that pulls from online sources to give people quick, citation-based responses. Backed by more than $1.5 billion from investors including IVP, New Enterprise Associates, and Nvidia, the startup has positioned itself as a challenger to traditional search.

The company pushed back on the lawsuit with a pointed statement. “Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media, and now AI. Fortunately, it’s never worked, or we’d all be talking about this by telegraph,” said Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity’s head of communication.

The dispute highlights a growing tension across the media and tech sectors. As AI companies race to train their systems on vast libraries of online material, publishers are trying to protect their archives and secure compensation for commercial use of their work. The Times already has a pending lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, filed in 2023, claiming their models absorbed Times reporting without permission.

These legal battles are piling up fast. In September, AI startup Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action brought by authors who said their books were scraped from pirated databases and fed into training models, CNBC reported. That agreement stands as the largest public copyright settlement tied to AI so far.

Perplexity’s case widens the fight. As AI companies compete to build services that summarize the entire online universe, courts are being asked to answer an unresolved question: where does open access to information end, and where does legal ownership begin?