By Jose Enrico
Publication Date: 2025-12-05 06:10:00
The Chicago Tribune filed a federal lawsuit against the AI-powered search engine Perplexity, alleging copyright infringement.
The suit, filed in a New York court, says Perplexity has been using the Tribune content without permission, renewing debates over AI and intellectual property rights.
Allegations of Unauthorized Use of Content
According to the suit, the Tribune contacted Perplexity in mid-October to confirm that the publication’s material was being used for AI training.
Perplexity’s legal team allegedly replied that it does not train the models directly on Tribune material but conceded the AI “may receive non-verbatim factual summaries.”
The Tribune says this is not true and that Perplexity provides content verbatim, effectively reproducing its articles without permission or license.
Scrutiny Over RAG and Paywall Bypass
The Tribune also targets Perplexity’s use of Retrieval Augmented Generation, or RAG, a system designed to decrease AI hallucinations, a term used to describe when AI uses made-up information by relying on verified sources.
Perplexity’s RAG systems use the newspaper’s content without permission, the Tribune says, and its Comet browser sidesteps the Tribune’s paywall to create detailed summaries of articles. The allegations raise broader questions about how AI models obtain and regenerate copyrighted materials in real time.
Perplexity’s Lawsuits
The lawsuit is part of a trend of media companies challenging the use of their content by AI…