
Stop the generative AI presses.
Perplexity is the latest AI startup to feel the legal sting of the New York Times, which has slapped it with a cease-and-desist order demanding Perplexity stop using the newspaper’s content for generative AI purposes.
In an Oct. 2 letter to Perplexity obtained by Reuters, the Times asked the company to “immediately cease and desist all current and future unauthorized access and use of The Times’s content.”
“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 publisher wrote.
The news publisher demanded Perplexity provide information on how it gained access to the NYT website despite prevention efforts.
“We are not scraping data for building foundation models, but rather indexing web pages and surfacing factual content as citations to inform responses when a user asks a question,” Perplexity told Reuters. The company had reportedly assured publishers it would stop using “crawling” technology and it announced “Perplexity Publishers’ Program,” a revenue-sharing model with publishers in July. Initial members included Fortune, Time, Der Spiegel and the The Texas Tribune.
The latest conflagration between the media outlet and an AI firm highlights what is sure to be an growing battle line as data-scraping bots sift through news sites and the web to collect vast troves of news and information, say tech and legal experts.
Late last year, the Times sued OpenAI for copyright violation for allegedly filching millions of its articles without permission to train its ChatGPT bot. Despite the high-profile lawsuit, several AI companies continue to ignore a web standard provided by publishers to block the scraping of their data used in GenAI systems.
Perplexity’s technology, which uses natural language and predictive text to glean relevant results, scraps web data and information from trusted sources such as news sites, web sites and journals. The company told Reuters it intends to respond to the NYT by an Oct. 30 deadline set by the publisher.
OpenAI has a similar program with publishing partners such as Time, News Corp and Hearst Communications Inc.
UPDATE: On Oct. 21, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which publishes the Wall Street Journal, and New York Post, sued Perplexity AI for allegedly scraping its copyrighted news content to train an AI model and diverting traffic from its websites without compensation.