CNN Sues Perplexity, Accusing AI Company of Stealing Its Copyrighted Content

CNN has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, accusing it of stealing the cable news outlet’s intellectual property.

The 54-page complaint was filed Thursday morning in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and included 1,165 pages of exhibits of the copyrighted and trademarked content CNN says Perplexity has “unlawfully copied,” including “over 17,000 CNN stories, videos, images, and other works to power its products and tools.”

As CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter pointed out in his report on the lawsuit, a growing list of publishers, media companies, and other content providers have sued AI companies for alleged copyright infringement, but this is the first such lawsuit filed by CNN and believed to be the first one filed by a television network.

News Corp (the parent company of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and book publisher Harper Collins, among others), The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Encyclopedia Britannica have all sued Perplexity. CNN’s complaint was accompanied by two “Statements of Relatedness” declaring its lawsuit “asserts copyright claims that overlap with the claims brought against the same Defendant” by the Times and Tribune, and that these “claims arise from substantially similar acts, including the Defendant’s unauthorized use of CNN’s content, including the articles and other content published on CNN’s Digital Platforms, to power Defendant’s…