The New York Post and Dow Jones have sued artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI for copyright infringement.
The Post and Dow Jones, both part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, are accusing Perplexity AI of “a massive amount of illegal copying of publishers’ copyrighted works”, the companies said in the suit.
“This suit is brought by news publishers who seek redress for Perplexity’s brazen scheme to compete for readers while simultaneously freeriding on the valuable content the publishers produce,” they said.
Perplexity AI uses information from other websites to summarise topics, referring to itself as an “AI search engine”.
According to the lawsuit, Perplexity ingests and stores content from news sites to create its summaries, which the Post and Dow Jones describe as copyright infringement.
"Perplexity perpetrates an abuse of intellectual property that harms journalists, writers, publishers and News Corp," said News Corp CEO Robert Thomson.
While Perplexity AI includes citations, the lawsuit alleges this has not brought new clicks to News Corp, as Perplexity markets itself as letting users “skip the links”. The suit also says Perplexity’s citations are often incorrect.
The lawsuit is seeking “the destruction of any index or database created by Perplexity that contains, or that cannot be shown to have fully and permanently deleted, [News Corp’s] copyrighted works”, as well as statutory damages.
The Post and Dow Jones’ lawsuit was filed in New York on October 21. Perplexity AI has not yet responded.
Last week, the New York Times sent Perplexity AI a cease-and-desist notice over the same issue. The Times said Perplexity has been “unjustly enriched by using, without authorisation, The Times’s expressive, carefully written and researched, and edited journalism”.
“No one organisation owns the copyright over facts,” Perplexity AI spokesperson Sara Platnick said at the time.
News Corp’s suit comes after Perplexity AI began negotiating its fourth funding round this year, hoping to raise US$500 million and drastically increase its valuation to US$8 billion.
News Corp’s (ASX: NWS) share price closed at AU$42.01 yesterday, up from $41.83 the day before. Its market cap is AU$1.18 billion. Perplexity AI is privately held.