The New York Times Sues Perplexity AI, Claims Copyright Theft and False Attribution in AI Outputs
According to the complaint, Perplexity scraped even pay-walled articles from nytimes.com and third-party databases.
The New York Times (NYT) has filed a major lawsuit against AI startup Perplexity AI, accusing it of “large-scale, unlawful copying and distribution” of Times articles to power its generative AI products.
According to the complaint filed December 5, 2025 in a U.S. District Court in New York, Perplexity scraped content — even pay-walled articles — from nytimes.com and third-party databases to create a private index used by its retrieval-augmented generation system. That system then serves summaries, direct excerpts, or near-verbatim reproductions of NYT content when users make queries.
In some cases, the complaint says, Perplexity’s chatbots and browser assistant displayed large portions of Times journalism — including paywalled content — eliminating the need for readers to visit the NYT site.
Moreover, the lawsuit claims that Perplexity has misused the newspaper’s trademarks by attributing fabricated or inaccurate content to NYT-branded publications such as The Athletic or Wirecutter. In one alleged instance, the AI tool quoted a “review” from Wirecutter for a recalled product — a review that never actually existed.
“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 NYT spokesperson Graham James in a statement.
The Times is seeking damages, statutory penalties, disgorgement of profits, legal fees and a permanent injunction to prevent Perplexity from continuing to access or distribute its content.
This legal action reflects escalating tensions between traditional publishers and AI developers over the unlicensed use of copyrighted material. The Times warns that continued unchecked reuse of journalism by AI tools could risk the economic foundations of original reporting.
NYT also sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, alleging their AI models were trained on its copyrighted journalism without permission, threatening subscriptions and undermining the economic value of original news reporting.
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