News Corp sues Perplexity for ripping off WSJ and New York Post

News Corp, the parent company of media outlets like The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, is suing the AI search engine Perplexity for infringing copyrighted content. In a lawsuit filed on Monday, News Corp alleges Perplexity copies news articles, analyses, and opinions "on a massive scale."

Perplexity is an AI startup that trains its AI search models using content from around the web, allowing it to respond to user queries with a summary of its sources. As outlined in the lawsuit, Perplexity bills itself as a platform that lets users "skip the links" to online articles, which News Corp alleges drives "customers and critical revenues away from those copyright holders."

In addition to accusing Perplexity of reproducing some content "verbatim," News Corp also claims Perplexity can falsely attribute facts and analysis to the company's outlets, "sometimes citing an incorrect source, and other times simply inventing and attributing to Plaintiffs fabricated news stories." The lawsuit claims News Corp sent a letter to Perplexity about its "unauthorized" use of its content in July, but Perplexity "did not bother to respond."

Over the past several months, news outlets like Wired and Forbes have accused Perplexity of scraping content without permission, bypassing paywalls, and even plagiarizing written work. Last week, The New York Times, which is also suing OpenAI, sent a cease and desist letter to Perplexity asking it to stop using its content. Perplexity has started paying some publishers for their content, including Time and Fortune.

News Corp is asking the court to force Perpelxity to stop using its content without permission and to destroy any database containing its works. The Verge reached out to Perplexity with a request for comment but didn't immediately hear back.

"Perplexity perpetrates an abuse of intellectual property that harms journalists, writers, publishers and News Corp," Robert Thomson, the CEO of News Corp, said in a statement. "The perplexing Perplexity has willfully copied copious amounts of copyrighted material without compensation, and shamelessly presents repurposed material as a direct substitute for the original source."

Thomson also said he applauds "principled" companies like OpenAI, which has struck deals with various outlets, including News Corp, in exchange for using their work to train AI.