he New York Times filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against AI search startup Perplexity on Friday, marking its second legal action against an AI company. The suit claims that Perplexity’s products, including its chatbots and Comet browser AI assistant, reproduce Times content without permission or compensation.
The lawsuit centers on Perplexity’s use of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which the Times argues allows the AI to crawl paywalled content and deliver verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions to users. The Times also alleges that the AI has occasionally hallucinated information and misattributed it to the outlet, causing brand harm.
Perplexity has attempted to address compensation through its Publishers’ Program and Comet Plus subscription model, which share revenue with participating outlets. Despite these initiatives, the Times says its content continues to be used unlicensed in commercial products.
This suit follows a similar filing by the Chicago Tribune, which also targets Perplexity’s RAG methods and paywall bypass practices. Perplexity has not responded to requests for comment on either lawsuit.
