The New York Times (NYT) has filed a major lawsuit against Perplexity AI, accusing the artificial intelligence (AI) company of illegally copying its journalism and using it to power commercial AI products.
The complaint, filed on December 5, 2025, in a US District Court in New York, says Perplexity has built its business by “large-scale, unlawful copying and distribution” of Times’ content, harming the paper’s ability to earn revenue from subscriptions, advertising, and licensing. As a result, NYT is asking for an injunction, damages, and a jury trial.
According to the filing, Perplexity scrapes NYT articles from nytimes.com and obtains them from third-party databases to create a private index that feeds its retrieval-augmented generation system. This system helps Perplexity generate answers, summaries and even verbatim excerpts from NYT stories without permission.
The complaint further states that Perplexity’s chatbots, browser assistant and API tools often reproduce Times reporting so completely that readers no longer need to visit their website. Notably, the filing includes multiple examples in which Perplexity’s products output large portions of Times articles, including paywalled content.
Alleged Evasion of Blocks and Violation of Terms of Service
The Times says that Perplexity’s access has continued even after repeated attempts to block it. The newspaper blocked Perplexity’s bots in its robots.txt file in 2024 and later placed a “hard-block” on its servers, yet the company allegedly continued trying to reach the site.
The complaint cites independent research claiming that Perplexity used undeclared user agents, disguised its crawlers to look like ordinary web browsers, relied on hidden IP addresses, and used third-party crawling tools to avoid detection. The Times argues that these methods violate both copyright law and the newspaper’s terms of service: which prohibit scraping, automated access and any use of its content for AI training, fine-tuning or grounding.
The lawsuit also accuses Perplexity of trademark violations for attributing fabricated or incomplete information to Times brands such as The NYT, Wirecutter and The Athletic. In one example cited in the complaint, Perplexity told a user that Wirecutter had praised a product recalled for safety concerns, even though Wirecutter has never reviewed it.
The Times argues that such “hallucinations”, presented alongside its trademarks, mislead the public and risk harming the paper’s reputation for accuracy. The complaint describes this as dilution by ‘tarnishment’, and says it amounts to false designation of origin.
NYT Says Journalism’s Business Model at Risk
The Times frames the dispute as essential to the survival of high-quality journalism. It says that its reporters, editors, photographers and producers invest enormous effort and resources to create original work, including investigations that can take months…
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