By Rose Esfandiari
Publication Date: 2025-12-08 13:15:00
“The Times argued that Perplexity’s products generate fabricated information, or ‘hallucinations,’ and falsely attribute them to the Times by displaying the newspaper’s registered trademarks alongside the false content.”
On December 5, The New York Times Company (the Times) filed a complaint for copyright and trademark infringement against Perplexity AI, Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, adding another major lawsuit to the growing wave of litigation against generative artificial intelligence (AI) companies.
The Times alleged in its filing that Perplexity engaged in “large-scale, unlawful copying and distribution” of millions of its articles to build its AI-powered “answer engine.” The complaint argued that Perplexity’s products directly substitute for the newspaper’s own content, thereby undermining its business and devaluing its journalism. Perplexity’s conduct “threatens this legacy and impedes the free press’s ability to continue playing its role in supporting an informed citizenry and a healthy democracy,” the Times argued.
The complaint detailed a two-stage infringement process where the Times argued that Perplexity unlawfully used software crawlers, including “PerplexityBot” and “Perplexity-User,” to scrape and copy vast amounts of content from nytimes.com. According to the filing, Perplexity intentionally ignored the Robots Exclusion Protocol (robots.txt), a standard…
