Chicago Tribune sues Perplexity over copyright infringement
What's the story
The Chicago Tribune has filed a lawsuit against AI search engine Perplexity, alleging copyright infringement. The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in New York on Thursday. The Tribune's legal team had previously contacted Perplexity in mid-October to inquire whether the AI platform was using its content. In response, Perplexity's lawyers claimed that while they didn't train their models with Tribune's work, they "may receive non-verbatim factual summaries."
Allegations
Perplexity accused of verbatim content delivery
The Tribune's legal team has countered Perplexity's claim, saying that the AI search engine is providing its content verbatim. The lawsuit also points a finger at Perplexity's retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technique. This method is designed to reduce hallucinations by using only accurate or verified data sources. The Tribune alleges that this system uses its content without permission and even bypasses paywalls through the Perplexity Comet browser to provide detailed article summaries.
Legal landscape
Tribune's involvement in other lawsuits against AI companies
Notably, The Tribune is one of 17 news publications from MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing that sued OpenAI and Microsoft over model training material in April. That lawsuit is still ongoing. In November, another nine from these publishers sued the model maker and its cloud provider. This highlights a growing trend of media companies taking legal action against AI firms for using their content without permission.
Ongoing cases
Perplexity's response and other ongoing lawsuits
Perplexity has yet to respond to the Tribune's lawsuit. The AI search engine is already facing similar lawsuits from Reddit and Dow Jones. Last month, Amazon also threatened legal action by sending a cease-and-desist letter over its AI browser shopping tool. These cases highlight the ongoing tensions between media companies and AI firms over content usage rights.