Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones, parent company of The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post filed a lawsuit on Monday against Perplexity, a generative AI company, accusing it of illegally scraping copyrighted content and diverting traffic to its own platforms. The lawsuit claims Perplexity uses scraped news reports to train its AI, generating responses that allow users to bypass the publishers’ websites, depriving them of revenue.
In a statement, News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson accused Perplexity of “massive freeriding” on copyrighted material, saying the AI firm “perpetrates an abuse of intellectual property” that harms journalists and publishers. He contrasted Perplexity with OpenAI, which has a licensing deal with News Corp., describing OpenAI as “principled” for compensating creators.
The lawsuit follows increasing tension between news publishers and AI companies over the use of their content to train models without permission or compensation. Last week, The New York Times sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter demanding it stop using its content.
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