Perplexity faces copyright infringement lawsuit from WSJ, NYP: report

Perplexity AI, a generative artificial intelligence search engine, faces a lawsuit from the News Corp’s (NASDAQ:NWS)(NASDAQ:NWSA) Wall Street Journal and New York Post for copyright infringement.

The publishers have accused the Nvidia-backed (NASDAQ:NVDA) AI startup of taking copyrighted news content to generate answers for search users, thereby steering web traffic away from publisher websites, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The suit was filed in U.S. District Court’s Southern District of New York on Monday. The publishers are requesting Perplexity to stop using content without permission, destroy any databases holding its copyrighted material and pay up to $150,000 per instance of copyright infringement, the report said.

This is the latest lawsuit in a string of incidents related to AI startups. The lawsuits have typically centered on AI companies using copyrighted content to train large language models.

Last week, The New York Times Company (NYT) sent Perplexity a “cease and desist” notice demanding the company stop using its content. And late last year, The New York Times sued Microsoft (MSFT) and OpenAI for copyright infringement, alleging the companies have illegally used the newspaper’s content to train AI models.

Perplexity, which is also backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is currently entering another fundraising round, as it attempts to double its valuation to $8B or more.

The startup does not have its own AI model, and instead uses a combination of existing LLMs. It recently began shifting its business model from a subscription basis to advertising, which is how the search giant Google (GOOG)(GOOGL) operates.

This summer, Perplexity announced it was entering a deal with several large publishing companies to split advertising revenue amid accusations of plagiarism by the tech company.

OpenAI has also reached several agreements with content creators, such as the Financial Times, to train its AI models.