The New York Times (NYT) has filed a major lawsuit against Perplexity AI, accusing the artificial intelligence (AI) company of illegally copying its journalism and using it to power commercial AI products.
The complaint, filed on December 5, 2025, in a US District Court in New York, says Perplexity has built its business by “large-scale, unlawful copying and distribution” of Times’ content, harming the paper’s ability to earn revenue from subscriptions, advertising, and licensing. As a result, NYT is asking for an injunction, damages, and a jury trial.
According to the filing, Perplexity scrapes NYT articles from nytimes.com and obtains them from third-party databases to create a private index that feeds its retrieval-augmented generation system. This system helps Perplexity generate answers, summaries and even verbatim excerpts from NYT stories without permission.
The complaint further states that Perplexity’s chatbots, browser assistant and API tools often reproduce Times reporting so completely that readers no longer need to visit their website. Notably, the filing includes multiple examples in which Perplexity’s products output large portions of Times articles, including paywalled content.
Alleged Evasion of Blocks and Violation of Terms of Service
The Times says that Perplexity’s access has continued even after repeated attempts to block it. The newspaper blocked Perplexity’s bots in its robots.txt file in 2024 and later placed a “hard-block” on its servers, yet the company allegedly continued trying to reach the site.
The complaint cites independent research claiming that Perplexity used undeclared user agents, disguised its crawlers to look like ordinary web browsers, relied on hidden IP addresses, and used third-party crawling tools to avoid detection. The Times argues that these methods violate both copyright law and the newspaper’s terms of service: which prohibit scraping, automated access and any use of its content for AI training, fine-tuning or grounding.
The lawsuit also accuses Perplexity of trademark violations for attributing fabricated or incomplete information to Times brands such as The NYT, Wirecutter and The Athletic. In one example cited in the complaint, Perplexity told a user that Wirecutter had praised a product recalled for safety concerns, even though Wirecutter has never reviewed it.
The Times argues that such “hallucinations”, presented alongside its trademarks, mislead the public and risk harming the paper’s reputation for accuracy. The complaint describes this as dilution by ‘tarnishment’, and says it amounts to false designation of origin.
NYT Says Journalism’s Business Model at Risk
The Times frames the dispute as essential to the survival of high-quality journalism. It says that its reporters, editors, photographers and producers invest enormous effort and resources to create original work, including investigations that can take months and global reporting that requires bureaus around the world.
The newspaper argues that Perplexity’s practice of summarising or reproducing this work without payment drains the value that supports journalism. The complaint warns that if AI companies can freely take news content, the economics of journalism will collapse, ultimately harming the public’s ability to access reliable information.
The lawsuit places significant emphasis on Perplexity’s rapid growth and large financial backing. For context, the filing notes reports that the AI company was valued at $20 billion in 2025, had raised nearly $1.5 billion in funding, served 22 million active users and handled hundreds of millions of queries each month.
It also points out that Perplexity spent substantial amounts on cloud computing and licensing to access AI models of other AI companies, but “paid The Times nothing” for the journalism that allegedly powers its answer engine. The Times also cites a 2024 study finding that AI search tools send far less traffic to publishers than traditional search engines, arguing that this loss of referral traffic cuts directly into a key revenue source.
Statements by Perplexity Leaders Included as Evidence
The complaint incorporates public statements from Perplexity executives to argue that the company openly acknowledges relying on copyrighted reporting to deliver answers. The Times has highlighted statements from Perplexity’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Aravind Srinivas explaining that Perplexity aims to streamline search by providing full answers rather than links, and that the company’s principle is to “only say what you can cite”.
While in another interview, Srinivas said, “You’re not supposed to say anything that you don’t retrieve.” The Times argues that this reflects Perplexity’s reliance on outside content such as reporting done by newspapers.
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Legal Claims and Relief Sought
In its legal claims, the Times alleges direct copyright infringement for both the acquisition of its articles and the outputs generated from them. It also asserts contributory and vicarious infringement in case Perplexity argues that users, and not the AI company, are responsible for the copying done through its tools.
Alongside copyright and trademark claims, the Times seeks statutory damages, actual damages, disgorgement of profits, legal fees, and a permanent injunction blocking Perplexity from accessing or using its content.
Earlier Flashpoint
Notably, this lawsuit did not emerge in isolation. In October 2024, NYT had sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist notice, accusing the AI startup of using Times’ journalism for summaries and outputs despite being technically blocked from the site. For context, NYT asked Perplexity to explain how it continued accessing its website and said its content still appeared on the platform even after Perplexity claimed it had stopped crawling.
Meanwhile, Perplexity insisted that it wasn’t scraping to train AI models, but merely indexing public webpages to surface factual citations, arguing that facts themselves cannot be copyrighted. Notably, that early clash set the stage for the escalating legal confrontation now unfolding.
Elsewhere, Reddit also sued Perplexity, alleging “industrial-scale” circumvention of scraping restrictions. Meanwhile, last month Amazon also filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, accusing the startup of using its Comet browser and associated AI agent to make purchases on the Amazon Store without authorisation.
Furthermore, in September 2025, Encyclopaedia Britannica and its subsidiary Merriam-Webster sued Perplexity for copyright infringement. And in June this year, BBC threatened to take legal action against Perplexity for allegedly creating verbatim reproductions of BBC reports.
What Comes Next
Perplexity has not yet submitted its response in court. And this case joins a growing number of lawsuits against AI companies over their use of copyrighted material: a legal issue that remains unresolved at the national level. The Times argues that the stakes extend far beyond this dispute, warning that AI companies imperil the very market that they copy and reproduce from for providing users with high-quality content.
“While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, we firmly object to Perplexity’s unlicensed use of our content to develop and promote their products. We will continue to work to hold companies accountable that refuse to recognise the value of our work” said an NYT spokesperson.
“Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media and now AI,” Perplexity’s Head of Communications, Jesse Dwyer said in a statement to The Times. “Fortunately, it’s never worked, or we’d all be talking about this by telegraph,” Dwyer added.
Pertinently, this lawsuit is the Times’s second major case against an AI developer. Back in 2023, the newspaper took OpenAI and its partner Microsoft to court, accusing them of using millions of NYT articles to train their AI models without paying for it. Both companies rejected the allegations.
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