By Межа
Publication Date: 2025-12-05 01:54:00
On Thursday, the Chicago Tribune filed a lawsuit against the artificial intelligence search engine Perplexity, accusing the service of copyright infringement. The suit, which TechCrunch has seen, was filed in a federal court in New York.
According to the Tribune’s complaint, lawyers asked Perplexity whether the service uses newspaper materials. In response, Perplexity stated that the service did not train its model on Tribune’s work, but, according to the complaint, may obtain not verbatim, factual summaries.
“may obtain non-verbatim, factual summaries.”
The lawsuit also alleges that Perplexity provides the newspaper’s content verbatim. This, according to the plaintiff, occurs through the use of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems.
Tribune notes that RAG is a method used to reduce hallucinations by ensuring the model relies only on accurate or verified data sources. The Tribune asserts that Perplexity uses newspaper materials in its RAG systems, gathered without permission.
“RAG is a method used to curb hallucinations by ensuring the model uses only accurate or verified data sources.”
It is also reported that Perplexity’s Comet browser bypasses the newspaper’s paywall to provide detailed summaries of these articles.
Tribune is part of MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing – one of the publications that in April filed lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft over…
