The New York Times has sent a cease and desist letter to demand that Jeff Bezos-backed Perplexity stop accessing and using its content in AI summaries and other output. The Wall Street Journal reviewed the document. 

The letter argues that Perplexity has been "unjustly enriched" by using the publisher's "expressive, carefully written and researched, and edited journalism without a license," which it says violates copyright laws.

It's not the first time this publication has crossed swords with AI companies — it's also suing OpenAI for allegedly using content without consent to train ChatGPT. Other publishers have accused Perplexity of unethical web scraping, too.

Copyleaks, a tool used to identify plagiarism and AI-generated content, recently ran a study that found Perplexity was able to summarize paywalled content from publishers.

Perplexity, which launched an ad-revenue share scheme last week, gives a bit of money back to publishers.

WSJ reports that the CEO of Perplexity, Aravind Srinivas, while stating that the startup is interested in working with the NYT says, "We have no interest in being anyone's antagonist here".