Explained: CNN sued Perplexity for copying 17,000 stories; here is what the case means for AI and the news industry – The Statesman

CNN has filed lawsuit against Perplexity, alleging that this AI search engine is unlawfully distributing its copyrighted content.

CNN’s lawsuit alleges that Perplexity violated federal copyright law by copying more than 17,000 CNN stories, videos, images, and other content to power its products and tools. According to the suit, Perplexity “unlawfully crawls, scrapes, copies, and distributes CNN’s content” from CNN and third-party platforms, using it to build an AI-first search index that delivers CNN’s content in real time as input to large language models so they can formulate responses to user queries.

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This is CNN’s first ever lawsuit against an AI company.

What is Perplexity?

Perplexity is a San Francisco-based AI startup that runs as an “answer engine.” Instead of showing users a list of links to click, Perplexity uses AI to scan the web and generate direct, conversational answers to questions. It pulls from websites and news sources, processes that content through its AI models, and delivers summaries or responses to users without requiring them to visit the original source.

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The company uses AI to scour websites and answer users’ queries. The core tension in this lawsuit, and in several others like it, is that Perplexity is doing this without paying the publishers whose content it is using. Perplexity currently has a…