In a suit filed Friday, the Times asserts claims for copyright infringement based on both Perplexity's "inputs" of its articles and its "outputs" to users, as well as contributory copyright infringement, false designation of origin and trademark infringement. The Tribune asserted identical claims in a suit filed Thursday.
The Times said Perplexity describes its chatbot as an "answer engine" that uses AI to scour the internet in response to queries.
"Perplexity then repackages the original content in written responses to users," the Times said. "Those responses, or outputs, are often verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, summaries, or abridgements of the original content, including the Times's copyrighted works. For example, according to a July 2025 study, Perplexity APIs cite the Times's content in 1.7% of outputs."
The Times says Perplexity violates the Lanham Act's trademark protection provisions when it generates "hallucinations" and falsely attributes them to the Times by showing them alongside the newspaper's trademarks. Perplexity also at times "misleadingly omits" portions of its content and therefore displays inaccurate versions of articles, the newspaper says.
The Times says it has become more difficult for the public to access quality information, as newspapers have shuttered and "misinformation floods the internet, television and other media." It said the technology's threat to its exclusive rights to its content risks further eroding journalism, making the potential cost to society "enormous."
Like most online publishers, the Times allows its articles to pop up in search engine results, but it says it had never given Perplexity permission to use its content. The reproductions Perplexity's search engine make go "far beyond the snippets typically shown with ordinary search results," and when users ask for more details, it usually gives more verbatim language, the suit says.
The Tribune says Perplexity violates its copyrights by unlawfully scraping content from its website and producing outputs that are "substantially similar" to the actual articles. It also accuses Perplexity of attributing hallucinated outputs to it.
Both newspapers provide examples of the chatbot spitting out information that closely resembles or uses verbatim portions of their reporting. The Tribune gives an example of Perplexity giving the first five paragraphs of an article titled "Blue Line horror brings a day of reckoning for the SAFE-T Act and hapless electronic monitoring in Cook County."
The Tribune says the chatbot paraphrased the article "while still reproducing the Chicago Tribune's protected expression."
"The Perplexity business model is based on the theft of journalism created by real live journalists at the Chicago Tribune and other publications. Journalists who work each day to serve the public interest, seeking justice and holding power accountable often at great personal and institutional risk," the newspaper's executive editor Mitch Pugh said in a statement Thursday. "Any accurate information that Perplexity provides to users is based entirely on this work. It is stealing, plain and simple. To make matters worse, too often bad information is provided to users and falsely attributed to trusted news publishers like the Tribune."
The Times sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity in October 2024 saying it was making unauthorized use of its copyrighted news content. Perplexity said at the time that its behavior was lawful.
Perplexity has been sued by other publishers, including a pending suit from Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster, who claim its chatbot gives very similar outputs to their content. Social media site Reddit has also claimed Perplexity is improperly scraping its site to train its chatbot.
Representatives for the Times and for Perplexity did not respond to requests for comment Friday.
The Times and the Tribune are represented by Steven Lieberman, Jennifer Maisel, Robert Parker, Jenny Colgate, Alexandra Hughes, Kristen Logan and Bryan Thompson of Rothwell Figg Ernst & Manbeck PC.
Counsel information for Perplexity was not immediately available Friday.
The cases are The New York Times Co. v. Perplexity AI Inc., case number 1:25-cv-10106, and Chicago Tribune Co. LLC v. Perplexity AI Inc., case number 1:25-cv-10094, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
--Editing by Adam LoBelia.
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