Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones, which is the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post both sued AI search startup Perplexity on Monday for infringing copyrighted content.
The News Corp.-owned companies accused Perplexity of a “massive amount of illegal copying” of their work. It marks the latest lawsuit in an ongoing battle between tech giants and media companies over the unapproved use of copyrighted content to train and build AI systems.
The New York Times last week sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist notice that demanded the company stop accessing and using its content. Forbes and Condé Nast have also threatened legal action against the firm.
“This suit is brought by news publishers who seek redress for Perplexity’s brazen scheme to compete for readers while simultaneously free riding on the valuable content the publishers produce,” Monday’s lawsuit stated.
Perplexity sources information from webpages and summarizes the results directly within its platform, as it works to take on the search engine market. The company is reportedly seeking to more than double its valuation to beyond $8 billion in its next funding round. It started the year with a $520 million valuation. A Perplexity spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the lawsuit.
The plaintiffs argued that Perplexity copies massive amounts of content and uses that information to “generate responses to users’ queries that are intended to and do act as a substitute for news and other information websites.”
The lawsuit is one of two paths that publishers are taking during this massive wave of AI-generated content. The other path comes through licensing deals. Perplexity debuted a revenue-sharing model for publishers earlier this year, announcing that Fortune, Time, and Entrepreneur joined the program.