New York Times sends AI startup Perplexity ‘cease and desist’ notice over content use – report

The New York Times (NYSE:NYT) has sent AI startup Perplexity a “cease and desist” notice demanding the company stop using its content, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The letter the news publisher sent to Perplexity — which is backed by Nvidia (NVDA), Alphabet’s (GOOG) (GOOGL) Google, Amazon’s Founder Jeff Bezos and several other investors — noted that the way the AI company was using NYT’s content, to create summaries and other types of output, violates its rights under copyright law, the report added.

Training large language models, or LLMs, allegedly using the help of copyrighted material has become a contentious issue. In December last year, The New York Times sued Microsoft (MSFT) and OpenAI for copyright infringement, alleging that the tech companies illegally used the newspaper’s content to train artificial intelligence models. In February, OpenAI asked a federal judge to dismiss parts of the NYT suit on allegations the media company paid someone to hack OpenAI’s products.