By Rohit Singh
Publication Date: 2025-12-08 08:30:00
The New York Times (NYT) has filed a major lawsuit against Perplexity AI, accusing the artificial intelligence (AI) company of illegally copying its journalism and using it to power commercial AI products.
The complaint, filed on December 5, 2025, in a US District Court in New York, says Perplexity has built its business by “large-scale, unlawful copying and distribution” of Times’ content, harming the paper’s ability to earn revenue from subscriptions, advertising, and licensing. As a result, NYT is asking for an injunction, damages, and a jury trial.
According to the filing, Perplexity scrapes NYT articles from nytimes.com and obtains them from third-party databases to create a private index that feeds its retrieval-augmented generation system. This system helps Perplexity generate answers, summaries and even verbatim excerpts from NYT stories without permission.
The complaint further states that Perplexity’s chatbots, browser assistant and API tools often reproduce Times reporting so completely that readers no longer need to visit their website. Notably, the filing includes multiple examples in which Perplexity’s products output large portions of Times articles, including paywalled content.
Alleged Evasion of Blocks and Violation of Terms of Service
The Times says that Perplexity’s access has continued even after repeated attempts to block it. The newspaper blocked Perplexity’s bots in its robots.txt file in 2024 and later placed a…
