New York Times Sends Cease-and-Desist to AI Startup Perplexity Over Content Use

The New York Times (NYT) has demanded that Perplexity, an AI search engine startup, stop using its content without permission.

According to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the NYT issued a cease-and-desist letter through its law firm, accusing Perplexity of violating copyright law by using its articles to generate summaries and other AI outputs.

“Perplexity and its business partners have been unjustly enriched by using, without authorization, The Times’s expressive, carefully written and researched, and edited journalism without a license,” WSJ reported the letter as saying.

Perplexity had previously assured the Times that it would cease using web-crawling technology to access its content. However, the NYT claims its material is still being used by the startup, according to Reuters.

“We are not scraping data for building foundation models, but rather indexing web pages and surfacing factual content as citations to inform responses when a user asks a question,” Perplexity told Reuters in response.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas addressed the dispute in an interview, stating that the company is not ignoring the Times’s efforts to block content crawling. He also confirmed that Perplexity plans to respond to the legal notice by the Times’s October 30 deadline.

“We are very much interested in working with every single publisher, including the New York Times,” Srinivas told WSJ. “We have no interest in being anyone’s antagonist here.”

The ongoing dispute highlights the growing tension between publishers and AI companies as news outlets grapple with the impact of generative AI technologies. While these tools offer potential benefits, such as data analysis and headline generation, they also pose significant risks for misuse and theft of content.

Many publishers, including the NYT, rely heavily on advertising and subscription revenue, which could be threatened by unauthorized use of their work. This is particularly concerning for media companies as AI-generated search summaries, such as those from Perplexity and Google, become more widespread.

A key issue is that users may read these AI-generated summaries without clicking through to the original article, depriving publishers of valuable traffic and revenue.

WSJ noted that several media companies have already signed deals with OpenAI, including News Corp, IAC, and Politico owner Axel Springer. These agreements involve compensation for the use of publisher content.

The situation mirrors findings from a recent investigation led by Press Gazette, which revealed that nearly a quarter of news-related search queries in the U.S. returned AI-generated summaries.

This pushed organic links to publisher articles further down the page, potentially reducing visibility. The investigation warned that this drop in search prominence could have a “devastating” impact on click-through rates for publishers.

Google has claimed that the links in AI Overviews actually generate more clicks, but it has yet to provide any supporting data, according to Press Gazette.

As the legal battle between the NYT and Perplexity unfolds, it underscores the complex relationship between AI technologies and the media, with publishers increasingly pushing back against the unauthorized use of their content.