The New York Times sent a cease-and-desist letter to Jeff Bezos-backed Perplexity, asking it to cease accessing and using the content in its AI summaries and other output. The Wall Street Journal reviewed the document.
The letter alleges that Perplexity “unjustly enriched” itself by exploiting the publisher's “unauthorized expressive, carefully written, researched, and edited journalism.” It is said to be in violation of copyright law.
This is not the first time the newspaper has engaged with an AI company, suing OpenAI for using its content to train ChatGPT without consent. Other publishers have also accused Perplexity of unethical web scraping.
A recent study by Copyleaks, a tool that checks plagiarism and AI-generated content, found that Perplexity can summarize paywalled content from publishers.
Perplexity recently launched an advertising revenue sharing scheme that gives money back to publishers.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told the Journal that the company is interested in working with the NYT, adding, “We're not interested in being anybody's adversary here.” said.