HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Perplexity AI Reportedly Accused in Federal Lawsuit of Purported Copyright Infringement and False Attribution of Chicago Tribune Content

December 4, 2025

The Chicago Tribune filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, accusing the AI system of unlawful reproduction and paraphrasing of copyrighted journalism. The complaint alleges that these actions bypassed links to the Tribune's website, potentially diverting revenue, and at times produced inaccurate information falsely attributed to the newspaper. This incident underscores the need for trustworthy AI governance, particularly in areas like harm prevention and safe and secure AI practices. HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM aims to help manage such issues through its robust framework. To learn more about how you can contribute to the development of guardrails for AI, JOIN US.

For those interested in mapping this incident to the HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM, consider how it fits within the 'Govern' function, emphasizing the need for effective AI governance.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
perplexity-ai
Alleged developer
perplexity-ai
Alleged harmed parties
chicago-tribune, journalism, journalistic-integrity, epistemic-integrity

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1298

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.