As one major tech vendor deals with publishers, another is being sued by an influential publisher.
On Friday, The New York Times filed a lawsuit against generative AI startup Perplexity Copyright infringementThe Times has accused Perplexity of illegally crawling its content and using its original journalistic reporting without permission or compensation,
In a statement on the Times website, spokesman Graham James said:
“While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, we strongly object to Perplexity’s unlicensed use of our content to develop and promote its products. We will continue to work to hold accountable companies that refuse to recognize the value of our work.”
On the same day that the Times filed its lawsuit in New York federal court, social media giant Meta said it was partnering with media outlets including CNN, Fox News, People Inc. and USA Today.
According to Meta, with the agreement, social media users will receive more real-time information when they ask Meta AI questions related to news.
Content Creators vs AI Vendors
Both the Times’ lawsuit against Perplexity and Meta’s partnerships with publishers reveal an AI market that is still struggling to determine who owns content and what copyright means in the age of generic AI technology.
In the last three years, since ChatGPT ReleasedWith AI chatbots and systems nervous about being able to derive original content and reuse it, the dynamics have changed, with many content creators fighting back and demanding compensation.
One of the most notable battles for compensation was when The New York Times sues OpenAI To use content from The Times to train its models without permission. Since that lawsuit, which is still ongoing, several others have followed, including Getty Images suing Stability AI and authors suing Anthropic.
Some cases have been resolved. For example, Anthropic settled its lawsuit and agreed to pay $1.5 billion to authorsOthers are still awaiting a court decision, and still others, like Perplexity, are continuing to face allegations in the form of lawsuits.
The Times Were Perplexity
Photo Credit: Michael M. Santiago via Getty Images
Perplexity’s lawsuit against the Times has been going on for a long time, since the publisher sent the AI search vendor cease and desist Notice in October 2024 and second notice in July 2025.
In its lawsuit, the Times alleged that it engaged in negotiations with Perplexity for more than 18 months, but the vendor continued to use its content without a licensing agreement. The Times also said that the Perplexity search engine uses false attribution, claiming that it wrote or published something it never did.
“The New York Times has got a very solid case because there is so much at stake here,” said Michael McCready, managing director of McCready Law in Chicago. “If the New York Times loses and Perplexity is allowed to continue what they are doing and access the New York Times, it sets a precedent for many other AI companies.”
He said the fact that the Times tried to work with Perplexity for 18 months meant the publishing company was confident it would win.
However, perplexity can also be argued transformative power of big Language Model (LLM), McCready continued. “They just need to get a membership,” he said. If an AI vendor has a subscription, it can argue that it is not simply republishing content, but that trained content transforms the original into new expressions of ideas.
McCready added, “Much of this lawsuit will depend on how LLM was trained, what content it produces and whether it displaces the market for The New York Times.” “Those will all be factual questions that ultimately have to be decided by a judge or jury, and where the evidence lands on each of those questions will determine how the case will proceed.”
The Times is not the only company to challenge Sellers. Last month, Amazon threatened to sue Perplexity because the AI shopping agent was allegedly making purchases for users posing as human users on Amazon’s website. In October, Reddit filed a lawsuit against the vendor and other so-called data scrapers, accusing them of illegally stealing content and using it to train their AI models.
a business strategy
The New York Times lawsuit may also be a business strategy, “putting more pressure on Perplexity to determine whether it can actually win the lawsuit,” said Michael G. Bennett, associate vice chancellor for data science and artificial intelligence strategy at the University of Illinois Chicago. “And then putting pressure in the context of the negative perception that more than a few people will be perplexed as a result of this lawsuit.”
Bennett said Tangle still needs to attract investors, so the case brought against it by one of the country’s oldest publishers is a flaw.
In an email statement, Perplexity’s head of communications Jesse Dwyer wrote, “Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the Internet, social media, and now AI. Luckily, it never worked, or we’d all be talking about this via telegraph.”
Bennett said, with this argument, Perplexity would have to make a strong argument in court that its business practices amount to fair use (the legal and permitted use of copyrighted material in the pursuit of free expression).
need a deal
The cases against Perplexity, as well as Meta’s move to partner with various publishers, demonstrate the need for a licensing agreement between content creators, publishers, and AI vendors, such as A recent deal in the music industry McCready said, between songwriters and record labels.
He said, “There needs to be some kind of licensing developed that would give LLMs access to all this content, and that would allow content creators to get some money.” “A case-by-case basis is not practical.”
