The New York Times Sued Perplexity for Allegedly Using Copyrighted Content and Generating False Attributions

December 5, 2025

In a historic case of AI governance, The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Perplexity on December 5, 2025, alleging copyright infringement. The Times claimed that Perplexity used their content to train its AI system without permission and generated outputs containing Times articles or incorrectly attributing fabricated information to the newspaper. This conduct, according to the suit, caused harm to the Times's business and reputation. Perplexity denies these allegations.

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MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.588, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 5.2 — similarity 0.584, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 6.2 — similarity 0.584, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: perplexity-ai
Alleged developer: perplexity-ai
Alleged harmed parties: writers, the-new-york-times, publishers, journalistic-integrity, journalism, epistemic-integrity

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1294

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.

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