The New York Times (NYT) is taking legal action against AI startup Perplexity. The publisher accuses the company of using its content without permission for AI-powered search results.
According to a document obtained by The Wall Street Journal, the NYT has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity, demanding that the company stop accessing and using its content. The NYT alleges that Perplexity is using its content without permission to create AI-generated summaries and other outputs, which the publisher claims violates its rights under copyright law.
"Perplexity and its business partners have been unjustly enriched by using, without authorization, The Times’s expressive, carefully written and researched, and edited journalism without a license," the letter states.
The NYT is requesting that Perplexity provide details on how the startup accesses its website despite protective measures. Publishers can use "robots.txt" code to indicate they do not want their sites scraped.
Perplexity had previously assured the NYT it would no longer use crawling technology that ignores such policies. However, the WSJ reports that NYT content continued to appear in Perplexity's search results when the cease-and-desist letter was sent on October 2.
"We have no interest in being anyone’s antagonist here"
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas denies the allegations. "We are very much interested in working with every single publisher, including the New York Times," he said in an interview. "We have no interest in being anyone’s antagonist here"
Srinivas emphasized that Perplexity is not ignoring the NYT's efforts to block crawling of its website. The company plans to respond to the legal request by the October 30 deadline set by the NYT.
Other publishers, including Forbes and Condé Nast, have made similar accusations against the startup for using their material without permission in AI-powered search results.
Perplexity plans to introduce advertising below its AI-generated answers later this month. The company has announced that it will share ad revenue with publishing partners whose content it uses.
However, the LLM search startup has reportedly only signed a handful of deals with individual publishers to secure a share of Perplexity's future ad revenue.
But unlike OpenAI's one-time payments, Perplexity's solution is scalable. If the company is successful, this could be a big revenue driver for publishers - think of it as having a stake in Google's current revenue.
Both solutions, Perplexity's share and OpenAI's one-time payments, are questionable from a media diversity perspective, as platform companies would decide the visibility of news - to an even greater extent than Google and social media currently do.
NYT vs. the AI industry
The NYT has already filed a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The publisher accuses the companies of using millions of its articles without a license to train AI models. The newspaper claims "damages in the billions" and demands the destruction of AI models trained with its articles.
OpenAI denies the allegations and claims that the NYT manipulated prompts to deliberately provoke copyright infringement.
