Dow Jones calls Perplexity a “free rider” and sues for copyright infringement

Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones and the New York Post have accused artificial intelligence startup Perplexity of a “brazen scheme” to rip off their journalism for its AI-powered search engine in a lawsuit filed in New York on Monday.

The publishers, both subsidiaries of News Corp, claimed that the AI ​​start-up, which is looking to raise up to $1 billion in a funding round valued at $8 billion, made “large-scale illegal copies” of their works operates work.

The lawsuit says Perplexity diverts “customers and critical revenue” from news publishers, whose titles include The Wall Street Journal, and “free rides on the valuable content the publishers produce.”

Perplexity’s search engine allows users to get instant answers to questions with sources and citations using large language models (LLMs) from platforms like OpenAI and Anthropic.

However, its “response engine” copies “on a massive scale… copyrighted news content, analysis and opinions as input into its internal database,” the lawsuit says. These then generate responses to user queries “that are intended to, and do, serve as substitutes for news and other information websites,” says the lawsuit, whose allegations also include copyright infringement.

The lawsuit is the latest conflict between publishers and AI companies that want to use content to train their models and provide users with up-to-date answers.

Some, like OpenAI, have signed commercial partnerships and licensing agreements with publishers, including News Corp and the Financial Times, which are among the newspapers that allow ChatGPT users to view selected summaries, quotes and attribute links.