The Chicago Tribune has filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence search engine Perplexity on Thursday, alleging copyright infringement. The Tribune claimed that its lawyers contacted Perplexity in mid-October asking if the AI search engine was using its content, according to the complaint. Perplexity’s lawyers replied it did not train models with the Tribune’s work but that it “may receive non-verbatim factual summaries,” the lawsuit claims.
The Tribune’s lawyers however, argue that Perplexity is delivering Tribune content verbatim. They are also calling out Perplexity’s retrieval augmented generation (RAG), saying it is using the newspaper’s content in its system, scraped without permission. RAG is a method used to limit hallucinations by having the model only use an accurate or verified data source.
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“By copying the Chicago Tribune’s copyrighted content and using it to create substitutive output derived from its works, obviating the need for users to visit the Chicago Tribune’s website or purchase its newspaper, Perplexity is misappropriating substantial subscription, advertising, licensing, and affiliate revenue opportunities that belong rightfully and exclusively to the Chicago Tribune,” the lawsuit states.
Mitch Pugh, executive editor of the Chicago Tribune said Perplexity business model is “based on the theft of journalism created by real live journalists at the Chicago Tribune and other publications.” “These journalists work each day to serve the public interest, seeking justice and holding power accountable often at great personal and institutional risk. Any accurate information that Perplexity provides to users is based entirely on this work. It is stealing, plain and simple.”
Perplexity’s lawyers also claim the Perplexity’s Comet browser is bypassing the paper’s paywall to deliver detailed summaries of those articles.
The Tribune is one of 17 news publications from MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing that sued OpenAI and Microsoft over model training material in April. The lawsuit is ongoing.
While there have been many lawsuits against AI companies, Chicago Tribune’s lawsuit will bring in the legal liabilities of RAG as well.
Perplexity is also facing multiple such suits, including one by Reddit, and another by Dow Jones. Last month, while Amazon didn’t sue, it did threaten to by sending a cease-and-desist letter over AI browser shopping.
The New York Times also escalated its legal battle against Perplexity as it is suing the company for allegedly producing and profiting from responses that are “verbatim or substantially similar copies” of the publication’s work. Like with the Chicago Tribune lawsuit, this lawsuit claims Perplexity “unlawfully crawls, scrapes, copies, and distributes” content from the NYT. It comes after the outlet’s repeated demands for Perplexity to stop using content from its website, as the NYT sent cease-and-desist notices to the AI startup last year and most recently in July, according to the lawsuit.