CNN has sued Perplexity, alleging the AI company infringed the news network’s copyrights and trademarks by illegally copying and distributing content without its consent.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, accused Perplexity of scraping more than 17,000 of CNN’s stories, photos, videos and other content and using it to train its products. The complaint is the network’s first legal case against an AI company to protect its copyright, though news companies including the New York Times, Dow Jones (publisher of the Wall Street Journal) and the New York Post have filed similar lawsuits against Perplexity. Other news publishers, including Time and USA Today Co. (formerly Gannett), have struck deals with the company.
A CNN spokesperson said that while the network “actively embraces the opportunities AI creates,” Perplexity “should not be able to steal from entities that create the original content” the company “exploits.” Meta announced a content-licensing deal with CNN last December.
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“The public rely on high quality news journalism reported by human beings to understand their world, which is frequently dangerous and expensive to produce,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Commercial operators can and must pay to make use of it. We prefer that they do so through sensible licensing arrangements, but if they refuse to do that as Perplexity has so far refused to do, they will have to pay through legal damages. There is no free option.”
A Perplexity spokesperson did not respond to an immediate request for comment. In response to the Dow Jones lawsuit, the company called the move “reflects an adversarial posture between media and tech that is — while depressingly familiar — fundamentally shortsighted, unnecessary and self-defeating.”
In the 54-page federal complaint, CNN points to Perplexity’s former advertisements that it helps users skip the “extra steps and clicks” they’d normally take to access news content. The network said it spoke to Perplexity about a deal last year, but it could not agree on terms, including restrictions on how the company’s chatbot uses CNN’s content. Therefore, after negotiations fell through, the network blocked Perplexity’s scraping bot from accessing its content.
“As a result, before and after Perplexity’s negotiations with CNN, Perplexity knew that it was not permitted to accessp [sic] CNN’s content or to use its trademarks or service marks,” the complaint read.
The network also claimed Perplexity falsely advertised a continued relationship with CNN by claiming users can upgrade to its “Comet Plus” tier to get access to CNN’s premium content. However, since no such relationship exists, Perplexity is violating CNN’s trademark, the network alleged.
“Perplexity’s use infringes CNN’s exclusive rights in its federally registered trademarks, and has caused and is likely to cause confusion, mistake, or deception as to whether the articles Perplexity provides are associated or affiliated with, or are sponsored, endorsed, or approved by CNN,” the complaint read. “Perplexity’s use is intended to reap the benefit of consumers’ trust in CNN.”
CNN asked the court to award it statutory damages and discontinue Perplexity from using its content. A copy of CNN’s complaint is at this link.