By Melia Russell
Publication Date: 2026-02-25 12:40:00
Perplexity is escalating its legal row with the publishers of The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, telling a federal judge they are refusing to hand over their search histories on the AI startup’s platform.
Perplexity, which was last valued at $20 billion, said in a motion filed February 24 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York that Dow Jones “cherry-picked” responses from Perplexity’s internet search engine to support its copyright lawsuit.
News Corp.’s Dow Jones and the New York Post sued the startup in 2024, alleging that it copied their content without permission or compensation to feed its search engine. Perplexity’s tool responds to user prompts with direct answers pieced together from trusted webpages, rather than just a list of links.
The dispute marks the latest escalation in the legal battles between AI companies and traditional publishers over who owns and profits from the internet’s content. At stake is whether AI search engines like Perplexity’s can legally ingest and summarize paywalled reporting without compensating the content owner.
Exposing an ‘inconvenient truth’
Dow Jones and the Post argue that Perplexity’s search engine will, at times, repeat their articles verbatim, which hurts their ability to sell ads and subscriptions for high-quality news.
In its latest filing, Perplexity claims that Dow Jones users effectively badgered the search…
