The New York Times Urges AI Search Engine Perplexity to Cease Use of Its Content

The New York Times has issued a cease and desist letter to AI search engine startup Perplexity, demanding that it stop using content from the newspaper's website, according to The Wall Street Journal. This action follows ongoing lawsuits from The Times against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of illegally training models on its content. The Times asserts that Perplexity has utilized its content without permission, a claim previously made by Forbes and Condé Nast.

The letter states: “Perplexity and its business partners have been unjustly enriched by using, without authorization, The Times’s carefully written and researched journalism without a license.” The New York Times strictly prohibits the use of its content for AI model training, disallowing several AI crawlers, including Perplexity’s, in its robots.txt file, which instructs search engine crawlers on which URLs to index.

Perplexity spokesperson Sara Platnick clarified that the company does not scrape content for AI training. Instead, she emphasized that “no one organization owns the copyright over facts,” framing their practices as indexing web pages and surfacing factual information. They plan to address The Times' notice before the October 30th deadline.

In a statement, Platnick noted: “We believe in transparency and have a public page on our website that clarifies our content policies. Our goal is to inform users by citing factual content rather than scraping data for model building.”

Following summer allegations of plagiarism, Perplexity has formed partnerships with various publishers, offering ad revenue and free subscriptions to organizations like Fortune, Time, and The Texas Tribune. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas stated that the company aims to collaborate with all publishers, including The New York Times.