December 5, 2025 – Two of America’s most storied newspapers filed federal copyright-infringement lawsuits against Perplexity AI this week, accusing the fast-growing artificial-intelligence search company of systematically copying and republishing their journalism without permission or payment.
The New York Times sued the San Francisco-based startup on Thursday in Manhattan federal court, one day after the Chicago Tribune filed its own complaint in the same courthouse. The near-simultaneous actions mark the latest front in a widening legal battle between traditional media companies and the generative-AI industry.
At the heart of both lawsuits is a simple but explosive claim: Perplexity is not merely summarizing the news — it is reproducing large chunks of copyrighted articles, sometimes word-for-word, and presenting them as its own answers while encouraging users to “skip the links” to the original publishers.
“A parasitic business model”
The New York Times called Perplexity’s practices “brazen and large-scale theft,” alleging that the company has ignored repeated cease-and-desist letters sent in October 2024 and July 2025. The complaint includes side-by-side screenshots showing Perplexity answers that lift entire paragraphs from Times investigations, reviews, and breaking-news stories — often with only minor rephrasing.
The Chicago Tribune’s 89-page filing is equally blunt, describing Perplexity as operating “a parasitic business model that depends on the unlawful copying and commercial exploitation” of its content. The Tribune highlighted Perplexity’s new Comet web browser, launched in October 2025, which it says deliberately circumvents the newspaper’s paywall to scrape premium articles and then serves near-verbatim summaries to users.
Both newspapers argue that Perplexity’s Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology — which pulls real-time web content to produce up-to-date answers — crosses the line from permissible summarization into wholesale reproduction and substitution.
Beyond training data: a new kind of infringement
Unlike earlier high-profile lawsuits (including The New York Times’ 2023 case against OpenAI and Microsoft), which focused primarily on the use of copyrighted material to train large language models, the Perplexity complaints target something different: the ongoing, real-time display of protected content inside AI-generated answers.
Publishers say this “substitutive” use directly competes with their own websites. When a user asks Perplexity “What happened in the latest Supreme Court ruling?” and receives a 400-word excerpt lifted from a Times or Tribune article, they have little reason to click through to the original source — starving publishers of traffic, subscriptions, and advertising revenue.
Perplexity’s defense so far
Perplexity has previously argued that its outputs are transformative, cite sources, and fall under fair use. In public statements and blog posts, the company has claimed it only produces “non-verbatim factual summaries” and that its citation system drives traffic to publishers.
The lawsuits, however, include dozens of examples where citations are missing, inaccurate, or appear only after the bulk of the copyrighted text has already been reproduced. In several instances, Perplexity is accused of hallucinating false information and falsely attributing it to the newspapers, potentially damaging their reputations.
A growing pile of lawsuits
Perplexity now faces at least five active copyright suits from major publishers:
- The New York Times (December 4, 2025)
- Chicago Tribune (December 3, 2025)
- Dow Jones & Company (The Wall Street Journal) – filed October 2025
- NYP Holdings (New York Post) – filed November 2025
- Reddit – filed October 2025 (trade-secret and trademark claims)
Smaller publishers, including dictionary makers and local news outlets, have also begun legal action or sent demand letters.
What happens next
The newspapers are seeking statutory damages (potentially up to $150,000 per infringed work), permanent injunctions that would force Perplexity to stop using their content, and the deletion of any copyrighted material from its systems.
Legal experts say the Perplexity cases could become a crucial test of whether real-time retrieval and reproduction by AI search engines qualifies as fair use — or whether it is simply old-fashioned copyright infringement dressed up in new technology.
For now, the 18-month-old startup, last valued at $9 billion after raising funds from investors including Jeff Bezos and Nvidia, finds itself in the same legal crosshairs that have already ensnared OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft.
As one line in the Chicago Tribune complaint puts it: “Perplexity is free-riding on the back of professional journalism while refusing to pay a dime for the privilege.”
The courts will now decide whether that ride can continue.