By Amiya Johar
Publication Date: 2025-12-05 17:07:00
The New York Times (NYT) escalated its battle with Perplexity AI, filing a federal lawsuit that accuses the startup of illegally copying, distributing and showcasing its articles to power its generative AI (genAI) tools.
NYT claims Perplexity ignored repeated requests over the past 18 months to stop using its articles until a licensing agreement could be negotiated.
According to the filing, Perplexity continued to “grab large chunks”, in some cases entire articles, to repurpose them in AI-generated responses offered to users. NYT argued this use does not qualify as fair use because the output directly competes with their own offerings. The publication claimed the AI start-up “provides commercial products to its own users that substitute for NYT, without permission or remuneration”.
The lawsuit also accused Perplexity of harming NYT’ s brand by sometimes presenting fabricated content through AI “hallucinations” and attributing it to the newspaper.
NYT previously issued a “cease and desist” notice to Perplexity AI in October 2024 and again in July this year demanding the startup cease its use of the publication’s content. At the time, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told the Wall Street Journal the company was “very much interested in working with every single publisher including The New York Times” and had “no interest in being…
