By The Tech Buzz Team
Publication Date: 2025-12-05 01:39:00
The Chicago Tribune just filed a federal copyright lawsuit against Perplexity AI, directly targeting the company’s Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technology for allegedly scraping and reproducing Tribune content without permission. This marks the latest escalation in media companies’ legal battle against AI firms, with the Tribune specifically claiming Perplexity’s Comet browser bypasses paywalls to deliver detailed article summaries.
The Chicago Tribune just threw down the gauntlet in what could become a defining legal battle over AI content practices. The newspaper filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against Perplexity AI on Thursday in New York, directly challenging how AI search engines use news content through their retrieval systems.
What makes this case particularly interesting is the Tribune’s laser focus on Perplexity’s Retrieval Augmented Generation technology. RAG is supposed to be the good guy in AI – it’s designed to reduce hallucinations by grounding AI responses in verified, real-world data sources. But the Tribune’s lawyers are flipping that narrative, arguing that RAG itself has become a sophisticated copyright infringement tool.
The legal drama started brewing in mid-October when Tribune lawyers reached out to Perplexity asking whether the AI company was using their content. Perplexity’s response, according to court documents seen by TechCrunch, was carefully worded: they denied training models directly on Tribune content but admitted…
