Media companies like News Corp that are suing generative AI companies are stuck in the past — and they risk getting left behind because “AI-enhanced search engines are not going away,” AI startup Perplexity said.
On Monday, News Corp-owned Dow Jones & Co. (publisher of the Wall Street Journal) and the New York Post filed a federal lawsuit against Perplexity, alleging it engaged in a “massive amount of illegal copying of publishers’ copyrighted works and diverting customers and critical revenues away from those copyright holders.”
Regarding the lawsuit, Perplexity said in a blog post, “We were disappointed and surprised to see this.” The lawsuit “reflects an adversarial posture between media and tech that is — while depressingly familiar — fundamentally shortsighted, unnecessary and self-defeating,” the company said. “We should all be working together to offer people amazing new tools and build genuinely pie-expanding businesses.”
Perplexity noted that it has struck revenue-sharing programs with publishers including Time, Fortune and Der Spiegel and said “our door is always open if and when the Post and the Journal decide to work with us in good faith, just as numerous others already have.”
San Francisco-based Perplexity’s investors include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post.
According to Perplexity’s count, there are about three dozen lawsuits filed by media companies against makers of generative AI tools. Those include the New York Times Co.’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, similarly alleging copyright infringement of its content. Last week, the New York Times sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist notice demanding the company stop using its content and asserting Perplexity’s system infringes its copyrights.
“The common theme betrayed by those complaints collectively is that they wish this technology didn’t exist. They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll,” Perplexity said in the post. “That is not our view of the world.”
News Corp, obviously, has a different perspective. CEO Robert Thomson has accused Perplexity of having “willfully copied copious amounts of copyrighted material without compensation” and that it “shamelessly presents repurposed material as a direct substitute for the original source. Perplexity proudly states that users can ‘skip the links’ — apparently, Perplexity wants to skip the check.”
Perplexity argued that the facts alleged in the Dow Jones/NY Post complaint are “misleading at best. Cited examples of ‘regurgitated’ outputs explicitly mischaracterize the source of the material.” According to Perplexity, its system is not designed for “reprising the full text of articles that can be more directly and efficiently obtained elsewhere).”
The lawsuit alleged that in July 2024, Dow Jones and the Post sent a letter to Perplexity “putting it on notice of the legal issues raised by Perplexity’s unauthorized use of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works and offering to discuss a potential licensing deal. Perplexity did not bother to respond.” Perplexity said it did, in fact, respond: “They reached out; we responded the very same day; instead of continuing the dialogue, they filed this lawsuit.”
The AI startup also asserted that in several cases, media companies that are suing “make all kinds of salacious allegations in their complaints about all kinds of seemingly bad things they were able to coax the AI tools to do — and then, when pressed in the litigation for details of things like how they achieved such obviously unrepresentative results, they immediately disavow the very examples they put in the public record, and swear they won’t actually use them in the case. We presume that is what will happen here.” Perplexity added, “And that will tell you everything you need to know about the strength of their case.”
The company also noted that the Wall Street Journal earlier this year ranked Perplexity the No. 1 overall chatbot in its “Great AI Challenge” bakeoff, ahead of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude.
“Perplexity is not going away,” the company said in the blog post. “We look forward to a time in the future when we can focus all of our energy and attention on offering innovative tools to customers, in collaboration with media companies.”