On December 5, 2025, The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The lawsuit alleges that Perplexity AI used unauthorized crawler tools to massively scrape and utilize copyrighted news content from The New York Times to train AI models and provide related services.

Perplexity AI, an American artificial intelligence company founded on January 1, 2022, specializes in developing conversational response engines and search engines based on large language models. Co-founded by former OpenAI employee Aravind Srinivas and others, the company offers search services integrating Q&A functionality and link lists. Its products include a free version and a Pro version powered by Claude 2.1, GPT-4V, Gemini, and others.

The New York Times alleges in its complaint that Perplexity AI circumvented the robots.txt restrictions on its website using Perplexity-Bot and Perplexity-User crawler tools. In August 2025 alone, these crawlers attempted over 175,000 accesses to the New York Times website.

Beyond copyright infringement, the New York Times also alleges trademark infringement by Perplexity AI. Perplexity's responses frequently included content labeled “from The New York Times,” some containing fabricated information. This could mislead users, create confusion about the source, and damage the New York Times' professional reputation.

The New York Times stated it opposes any unauthorized conversion of news producers' labor into commercial gain, asserting that Perplexity's practices have crossed industry boundaries. Perplexity has not yet responded.

Scan the QR code to access the complaint: