By Prabhanu Kumar Das
Publication Date: 2026-05-29 10:15:00
Cable News Network (CNN) has sued Perplexity AI in a federal court in New York, accusing the AI search company of copyright and trademark infringement through the unauthorised use of CNN’s journalism. In a complaint filed on May 28, CNN alleged that Perplexity unlawfully copied, stored, and distributed its content to power a range of AI products, including its consumer chatbot, enterprise offerings, APIs, and the Comet browser.
The lawsuit adds to a growing list of legal challenges facing Perplexity. The company is already defending copyright and trademark cases brought by Dow Jones and NYP Holdings, Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster, The New York Times Company, and the Chicago Tribune Company. CNN is seeking an undisclosed amount of damages, court orders to stop the alleged conduct, and a jury trial.
Copyright infringement allegations: CNN’s complaint centres on what it describes as a two-stage infringement process. First, it alleges that Perplexity unlawfully crawls, scrapes, copies and stores CNN content to build its search index and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. Second, it alleges that Perplexity reproduces that content in responses generated by its AI products.
According to the complaint, Perplexity has “unlawfully copied over 17,000 CNN stories, videos, images, and other works to power its products and tools.” CNN claims Perplexity’s GenAI products generate outputs that are “identical or substantially…
