The New York Times warns AI search engine Perplexity to stop using its content

The New York Times has demanded that AI search engine startup Perplexity stop using content from its site in a cease and desist letter sent to the company, reports The Wall Street Journal. The Times, which is currently suing OpenAI and Microsoft over allegedly illegally training models on its content, says the startup has been using its content without permission, a claim made earlier this year by Forbes and Condé Nast.

The Journal included this passage from the letter:

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 New York Times prohibits using its content for AI model training. It disallows several AI crawlers, including Perplexity's, in its robots.txt file that tells search engine crawlers which URLs they can index.

In a statement from Perplexity spokesperson Sara Platnick, the company says it doesn't scrape content for AI training but also argues that "no one organization owns the copyright over facts" to defend what it says is "indexing web pages and surfacing factual content."

It plans to respond to the notice by the Times' deadline of October 30th.

Here's more of Perplexity's statement: