News Corp's Dow Jones and the NY Post have sued growing AI startup Perplexity over what they describe as a "content kleptocracy."

In a complaint filed in New York on Monday, the media organization alleged that Perplexity commits copyright infringement on a "grand scale," duplicating and falsely portraying original content created by others:

Its AI "answer engine" copies on an industrial scale, inter alia, copyrighted news content, analysis, and opinion as inputs into its internal database. It then uses that copyrighted content to generate answers to users' queries that are intended to and do act as a substitute for news and other information websites. Perplexity loudly touts that its answers to user queries are so reliable that its users can "Skip the Links" to the original publishers and instead rely wholly on Perplexity for their news and analysis needs. What Perplexity does not advertise is that its core business model hinges upon vast freeriding upon protected Plaintiffs' content in order to compete with Plaintiffs for the attention of the very same news-consumption crowd, and therefore to deny Plaintiffs important revenue streams.

News Corp is by far not the first to speak out against it. Many news sites have complained that Perplexity takes too close a print to their content, with the occasional egregious example, such as with an article that Forbes called out this summer. Just last week, The New York Times sent a cease and desist to Perplexity.

For its own part, perplexity seems inclined to characterize its web scrapers as collecting data not for inclusion into AI training but only as an index for its models to refer to when trying to answer a user's question.

We have reached out to the company for comment and will update this post if we hear back. (Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas posted a Perplexity ad topping the front page of the Wall Street Journal, named in the suit.)

The fast-paced industry has largely avoided copyright law, but the unprecedented nature of large-scale AI agents and scrapers means that the existing rules may not apply as one might intuitively expect. Several lawsuits are well under way alleging a range of forms of copyright infringement, but none have resulted in a conclusion. Each no doubt hopes it is filing the landmark lawsuit that breaks the back of big AI.

"We applaud principled companies like OpenAI, which understands that integrity and creativity are essential if we are to realize the potential of Artificial Intelligence," wrote News Corp CEO Robert Thomson in a statement. (News Corp signed a lucrative multiyear content deal with OpenAI earlier this year.)

"Perplexity is not the only AI company that misuses intellectual property and it is not the only AI company that we will pursue with vigor and rigor," the statement continued. "We have made clear that we would rather woo than sue, but, for the sake of our journalists, our writers and our company, we must challenge the content kleptocracy."

News Corp wants $150,000 per infringement, plus Perplexity's profits on them, among other remedies, which would be astronomical damages depending on the interpretation of the evidence.