Last week, the New York Times filed a lawsuit accusing Perplexity AI, backed by Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos, of illegally harvesting its journalism and misrepresenting fabricated content.
NYT Says Perplexity Scraped Millions Of Articles Without Permission
On Friday, The Times sued Perplexity AI in federal court, alleging the fast-growing startup copied, distributed and displayed its articles — including paywalled stories — to build and promote its generative AI tools.
The complaint claims the company's business model relies on systematic scraping and copying of copyrighted material that it never licensed.
Graham James, spokesperson for The Times, said it objects to Perplexity's unapproved use of content to train and advance its products as "that content should only be accessible to our paying subscribers."
The Times also alleged that Perplexity's models produced false or misleading summaries and paired them with the newspaper's branding, creating the impression the Times reported information it never published.
The filing argues such "hallucinations" risk reputational harm and confuse readers about the source of the content.
The lawsuit, lodged in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, followed more than a year after the New York Times issued a cease-and-desist notice to Perplexity.
Perplexity AI Denies Scraping Claims
Perplexity AI's communications chief, Jesse Dwyer, dismissed the lawsuit, calling it a failed strategy often employed by publishers to challenge new technologies, reported Reuters.
The company previously said that it does not scrape data to train foundation models, but instead indexes web pages and offers factual citations, the report added.
The Chicago Tribune also filed a lawsuit against Perplexity on Thursday.
Perplexity AI did not immediately respond to Benzinga's request for comments.
Perplexity is currently valued at roughly $20 billion.
Benzinga’s Edge Stock Rankings indicate AMZN is trending upward in short, medium and long-term time frames, with further performance details accessible here.
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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
