A high-stakes battle between a prominent newspaper and an AI startup has escalated, with The New York Times serving a cease and desist letter to Perplexity, a company backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The newspaper alleges that Perplexity’s use of its content to create answers and summaries through its AI portal constitutes copyright infringement.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the letter accuses Perplexity and its investors of profiting unfairly from the use of The New York Times’ copyrighted material without permission. The letter demands that Perplexity cease its activities and respond to the allegations by October 30, or face legal action.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has acknowledged receipt of the letter, stating that the company is eager to engage in discussions with The New York Times. “We are very much interested in working with every single publisher, including The New York Times,” he said.
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This is not the first time an AI company has run afoul of The New York Times’ copyright policies. In a separate lawsuit, the newspaper is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for allegedly using millions of its articles to train their AI software. The suit claims that both companies used over 66 million records from The New York Times’ archives to train their AI models, representing nearly a century’s worth of copyrighted content.
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Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services has launched an investigation into Perplexity’s activities, following reports that the company’s machines had visited hundreds of Condé Nast publications to scan for content to use in its AI responses. Wired reported that Perplexity’s machines had accessed Condé Nast properties hundreds of times, raising concerns about the company’s content collection practices.
