The New York Times warns AI search engine Perplexity to stop using its content

The New York Times has demanded that AI search engine startup Perplexity stop using content from its site in a cease and desist letter sent to the company, reports The Wall Street Journal. The Times, which is currently suing OpenAI and Microsoft over allegedly illegally training models on its content, says the startup has been using its content without permission, a claim made earlier this year by Forbes and Condé Nast.

The Journal included this passage from the letter:

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.

The New York Times prohibits using its content for AI model training. It disallows several AI crawlers, including Perplexity’s, in its robots.txt file that tells search engine crawlers which URLs they can index.

In a statement from Perplexity spokesperson Sara Platnick, the company says it doesn’t scrape content for AI training but also argues that “no one organization owns the copyright over facts” to defend what it says is “indexing web pages and surfacing factual content.”

It plans to respond to the notice by the Times’ deadline of October 30th.

Here’s more of Perplexity’s statement:

We believe in transparency and have a public page on our website that clarifies our content policies and how we use web content. We aren’t 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. The law recognizes that no one organization owns the copyright over facts. This is what allows us to have a rich and open information ecosystem, not to mention, it gives news organizations the ability to report on topics that were previously covered by another news outlet. 

Following the plagiarism accusations over the summer, Perplexity made some publisher deals, offering ad revenue and free subscriptions to partners that include Fortune, Time, and The Texas Tribune.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told the Journal that Perplexity has “no interest in being anyone’s antagonist here” and is interested in “working with every single publisher, including the New York Times.”