The New York Times has issued a “cease and desist” notice to AI startup Perplexity, demanding an end to its use of the publisher’s content for generative AI applications. This development highlights an ongoing confrontation between traditional media outlets and emerging AI technologies.
In its letter, dated October 2, the Times asserted that Perplexity’s practices, including creating summaries and various outputs from its articles, violate copyright law. This incident is part of a broader trend where publishers express concerns about AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, which aggregate information from the internet to generate summaries for users.
The Times has requested that Perplexity disclose how it accesses its website, especially given previous assurances from the startup that it would cease using “crawling” technology. Despite these commitments, the Times noted that its content remains visible on the Perplexity platform.
In response, Perplexity clarified to Reuters that it does not engage in data scraping for model development but instead indexes web pages to surface factual information as citations when responding to user queries. The startup has indicated it will comply with the Times’ request by the October 30 deadline.
This dispute adds to the ongoing tension between the Times and OpenAI, which the publisher sued late last year for allegedly using millions of its articles without authorization to train its AI chatbot. Earlier this year, reports surfaced that several AI companies were circumventing web standards designed to prevent data scraping by generative AI systems.
Perplexity has faced similar accusations from media organizations, including Forbes and Wired, regarding content plagiarism. In an effort to alleviate some of these concerns, the startup has initiated a revenue-sharing program with publishers.
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