The Chicago Tribune is suing the AI search engine Perplexity for copyright infringement. The lawsuit, which TechCrunch has reviewed, was filed in a federal court in New York on Thursday.
According to the complaint, the Tribune’s lawyers reached out to Perplexity in mid-October to inquire if the AI search engine was using its content. Perplexity’s legal team responded by stating that they do not train their models using the Tribune’s work, although they mentioned that the service “may receive non-verbatim factual summaries.”
However, Tribune lawyers argue that Perplexity is providing the newspaper’s content word-for-word.
Additionally, the Tribune’s attorneys are criticizing Perplexity’s Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system. RAG is designed to minimize inaccuracies by relying solely on verified data sources. The Tribune contends that Perplexity is incorporating its content into RAG systems without permission. They also claim that Perplexity’s Comet browser bypasses the newspaper’s paywall to deliver in-depth summaries of its articles.
The Tribune is part of a group of 17 news publications from MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing that filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in April regarding training materials used for their models. That case is still underway. Another set of nine publishers from the same group sued the model developer and its cloud provider in November.
While various content creators have taken legal action against model developers for using their work, it remains to be seen how the courts will rule on the legal implications surrounding RAG.
Perplexity has not yet responded to the Chicago Tribune’s report on the lawsuit, nor did it reply to TechCrunch’s request for comments. The company is currently facing similar legal challenges; Reddit filed a lawsuit in October, and Dow Jones is also taking action. Last month, although Amazon did not file a suit, it issued a cease and desist letter concerning AI browser shopping.
