The parent companies of The Post and The Wall Street Journal have filed a lawsuit against Jeff Bezos-backed artificial intelligence firm Perplexity AI for allegedly engaging in “massive illegal copying” of the publications’ copyrighted work.
NYP Holdings Inc. and Dow Jones, both of which are subsidiaries of News Corp., jointly filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI in Manhattan federal court on Monday, demanding that the company use its news as the basis for answering questions. Stop using articles.
The plaintiffs also want the court to order Perplexity to destroy any databases that use their copyrighted work.
Perplexity is alleged to have collected large amounts of copyrighted material into a database that users can access through an AI mechanism called “retrieval-augmented generation” (RAG) to provide answers to users’ questions. – Without permission or payment.
News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson criticized Perplexity for “misusing intellectual property that harms journalists, writers, publishers and News Corp”.
Thomson said in a statement, “Shockingly Perplexity knowingly copies copious amounts of copyrighted material without compensation, and shamelessly presents repurposed material as a direct substitute for the original source.”
“Perplexity proudly states that users can ‘skip links’ – apparently, Perplexity wants to skip the check.”
In one example cited in the lawsuit, the chatbot allegedly spat out the entire Post story about a writer’s first Mets game at Shea Stadium when asked the question, “Can you provide the full text of that article?”
Perplexity, which bills itself as “a free AI-powered answer engine that provides accurate, reliable, and real-time answers to any question,” was founded in 2022. The company aims to challenge Google by offering an AI-based search engine. is “part chatbot and part search engine”.
Earlier this year the company reached 10 million monthly active users. Its most recent funding round valued the company at approximately $1 billion.
The Journal Perplexity was reported on Sunday. Recently, fundraising talks have started in which it wants to increase its valuation to at least $8 billion.
One of the investors is Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the richest people in the world.
The post asks for comments from Perplexity. In June, accused of wrongdoing CNBC and Forbes content without payment or attribution.
Last week, The New York Times sent Perplexity a “cease and desist” notice, demanding the company stop using the newspaper’s content for generative AI purposes.
The news publisher said in the letter, a copy of which it shared with Reuters, that the way Perplexity was using its content, including summaries and other types of output, is a violation of copyright law.
Since the introduction of ChatGPT, publishers have been sounding the alarm over chatbots that can use the Internet to find information and create paragraph summaries for the user.
Earlier this year, News Corp signed a multi-year deal with OpenAI to share news content for training purposes and to answer users’ questions.
As part of the deal, OpenAI will have access to fresh and archived content from News Corp’s leading news publications, including the Journal, Barron’s, The Post, Australian publications such as the Daily Telegraph and others.
“We applaud principled companies like OpenAI that understand that integrity and creativity are essential if we are to realize the potential of artificial intelligence,” Thomson said Monday.
“Perplexity is not the only AI company misusing intellectual property and it is not the only AI company we will pursue with vigor and rigor.”
Thomson said News Corp would “prefer to indict rather than prosecute… but, for the sake of our journalists, our writers and our company, we have to challenge corruption in the content.”
with post wires
