By Ananya Gairola
Publication Date: 2025-12-08 05:57:00
Last week, the New York Times filed a lawsuit accusing Perplexity AI, backed by Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos, of illegally harvesting its journalism and misrepresenting fabricated content.
NYT Says Perplexity Scraped Millions Of Articles Without Permission
On Friday, The Times sued Perplexity AI in federal court, alleging the fast-growing startup copied, distributed and displayed its articles — including paywalled stories — to build and promote its generative AI tools.
The complaint claims the company’s business model relies on systematic scraping and copying of copyrighted material that it never licensed.
Graham James, spokesperson for The Times, said it objects to Perplexity’s unapproved use of content to train and advance its products as “that content should only be accessible to our paying subscribers.”
The Times also alleged that Perplexity’s models produced false or misleading summaries and paired them with the newspaper’s branding, creating the impression the Times reported information it never published.
The filing argues such “hallucinations” risk reputational harm and confuse readers about the source of the content.
The lawsuit, lodged in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, followed more than a year after the New York Times issued a cease-and-desist notice to Perplexity.
