The New York Times targets AI company Perplexity in explosive new lawsuit

New York, New York – The New York Times sent a cease and desist letter to Perplexity, a AI startup often touted as a promising competitor to Google Search, due to alleged copyright claims offense.

The move, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, follows a Times lawsuit last year against OpenAI, accusing the creator of ChatGPT of stealing content to train its powerful AI with copyrighted material. copyright.

The Times’ confrontational approach contrasts with many news outlets that have entered into content deals with platforms that crawled websites to improve their technology without prior permission.

In a letter seen by AFP on October 2, the Times accuses San Francisco-based Perplexity of unauthorized use of its copyrighted content in the company’s artificial intelligence products.

Perplexity.ai is an AI-powered search engine and question answering platform known for its minimalist, conversational interface.

Unlike ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity’s tool provides up-to-date answers that often include links to source documents, allowing users to verify information.

The letter, addressed to Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, described several alleged violations, including violations of the Times’ terms of service, unauthorized circumvention of paywall measures and unjust enrichment through use of Times journalism without license.

The Times added that despite assurances that Perplexity was no longer mining its data, evidence suggested this was still the case.

It claimed the AI ​​company was using Times content through a technique called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) without permission.

RAG allows AI systems to refine responses by extracting relevant information from a database of existing content, thereby enhancing up-to-date facts and data in an existing AI model.

The newspaper gave Perplexity until October 30, 2024 to comply with its requests and ordered the company to preserve all relevant documents related to its use of Times content.

This points to potential legal action if the problem is not resolved.

Perplexity said it would respond to the letter, just as it did when Forbes and Condé Nast similarly contacted it.

The spokesperson said the company does not scrape data, “but rather indexes web pages and surfaces factual content…”

“The law recognizes that no organization owns the copyright to the facts,” the spokesperson added.