By Kyle Jahner,Carmen Castro-Pagán
Publication Date: 2026-05-28 13:21:00
Cable News Network Inc. hit Perplexity AI Inc. with a lawsuit alleging the artificial intelligence company violated federal copyright law by copying more than 17,000 CNN stories, videos, images, and other content to power its products and tools.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, says that Perplexity “unlawfully crawls, scrapes, copies, and distributes CNN’s content” from CNN and third-party platforms to build an AI-first search index to provide CNN’s content in real time as input to large language models to formulate responses to users’ prompts.
It also claims the tool violates trademark law by falsely claiming a connection to CNN and at times falsely attributing erroneous “hallucinations” to the news giant.
CNN’s lawsuit comes six months after The New York Times and Chicago Tribune raised similar claims under the Copyright Act against Perplexity. In March, the AI company asked a federal court to toss claims brought over it AI search engine.
The three suits, all brought by the law firm Roth Figg Ernst & Manbeck PC, highlight the particular threat AI search tools pose to news outlets. They all claim Perplexity promoted itself as a substitute for the news outlet with a “skip the clicks” tagline, suggesting bypassing the creators of the information Perplexity relays. Research indicates AI bots lead to more than 95% less referral traffic than a traditional search, they say, due to them providing…
