New York Times Sues A.I. Start-Up Perplexity Over Use of Copyrighted Work
Source: New York Times
Dec. 5, 2025, 8:14 a.m. ET
The New York Times claimed in a lawsuit on Friday that its copyrights were repeatedly violated by Perplexity, an artificial intelligence start-up that has built a cutting-edge internet search engine. The Times said in its lawsuit that it had contacted Perplexity several times over the past 18 months, demanding that the start-up stop using the publication’s content until the two companies negotiated an agreement. But Perplexity continued to use The Times’s material.
The suit, filed in federal court in New York, is the latest in a growing legal battle between copyright holders and A.I. companies that includes more than 40 cases around the country. In August 2024, Dow Jones, owner of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and other publications, made similar claims in another lawsuit against Perplexity.
The suit is also the second that The Times has filed against A.I. companies. In December 2023, The Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft, arguing that the companies trained their A.I. systems using millions of articles published by The Times without offering compensation. Microsoft and OpenAI, the maker of the chatbot ChatGPT, have disputed the claims.
Perplexity, a San Francisco company founded in 2022 by a former OpenAI engineer and other entrepreneurs, operates a search engine powered by the same type of A.I. technology that underpins ChatGPT.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/technology/new-york-times-perplexity-ai-lawsuit.html
No paywall (gift)
= new reply since forum marked as read
since Perplexity claims they combine the collective models of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. I'm not sure why anyone would pay for Perplexity when the underlying models are free.
I suppose the lawsuit's point is the NY Times wants people to pay for NY Times content. At the risk of incriminating myself, I'm sure many of us have used such tools to get around paywalls. 
How do the AI companies make their dough these days anyway? It seems they give everything away for free, including intellectual property they don't own.
