The CNN-Perplexity Lawsuit Is Not Just Another AI Copyright Case

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CNN recently filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, alleging that the company copied more than 17,000 CNN articles, videos, and images to power its AI search products without permission or compensation. The case arrives amid a broader wave of AI copyright litigation, and the instinct among policymakers is likely to treat it as more of the same. That instinct is wrong, and treating this case as equivalent to other training-data lawsuits could lead to poor policy in either direction.

Publisher copyright claims should not be used to broadly constrain AI development. However, this CNN case is legally distinct from the training-data lawsuits filed against OpenAI, Anthropic, and others, and that distinction matters. Those cases center on whether using publicly available content to train AI models constitutes fair use. CNN alleges something different. It claims that Perplexity’s products reproduce CNN’s journalism in near-verbatim form and in real time through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), a technique that pulls live content from specific websites or databases to answer Internet search queries and reduce AI “hallucinations.” As a result, Perplexity may be delivering content that is identical or substantially similar to material CNN reserves for both visitors and paying subscribers, without directing users to CNN.com. The good news is that existing copyright law already addresses this issue. Congress does not need to wait for a new legal doctrine to…