New York Times Sues A.I. Start-Up Perplexity Over Use of Copyrighted Work
Source: New York Times
Dec. 5, 2025, 8:14 a.m. ET
The New York Times claimed in a lawsuit on Friday that its copyrights were repeatedly violated by Perplexity, an artificial intelligence start-up that has built a cutting-edge internet search engine. The Times said in its lawsuit that it had contacted Perplexity several times over the past 18 months, demanding that the start-up stop using the publication’s content until the two companies negotiated an agreement. But Perplexity continued to use The Times’s material.
The suit, filed in federal court in New York, is the latest in a growing legal battle between copyright holders and A.I. companies that includes more than 40 cases around the country. In August 2024, Dow Jones, owner of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and other publications, made similar claims in another lawsuit against Perplexity.
The suit is also the second that The Times has filed against A.I. companies. In December 2023, The Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft, arguing that the companies trained their A.I. systems using millions of articles published by The Times without offering compensation. Microsoft and OpenAI, the maker of the chatbot ChatGPT, have disputed the claims.
Perplexity, a San Francisco company founded in 2022 by a former OpenAI engineer and other entrepreneurs, operates a search engine powered by the same type of A.I. technology that underpins ChatGPT.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/technology/new-york-times-perplexity-ai-lawsuit.html
No paywall (gift)
= new reply since forum marked as read
since Perplexity claims they combine the collective models of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. I'm not sure why anyone would pay for Perplexity when the underlying models are free.
I suppose the lawsuit's point is the NY Times wants people to pay for NY Times content. At the risk of incriminating myself, I'm sure many of us have used such tools to get around paywalls. 
How do the AI companies make their dough these days anyway? It seems they give everything away for free, including intellectual property they don't own.
I hate ChatGPT and OpenAi so I am fine with this lawsuit.
But I also hate the NYT, which is correctly called out as not left or right but mercenary and they are being very cavalier as could be expected of them:
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/5383530-chatgpt-users-privacy-collateral-damage/
BY JAY EDELSON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 07/06/25 2:00 PM ET
Soon, lawyers for the Times will start combing through private ChatGPT conversations, shattering the privacy expectations of over 70 million ChatGPT users who never imagined their deleted conversations could be retained for a corporate lawsuit.
I wouldn’t have had any expectation of privacy from OpenAi etc which is why I don’t use their products. But this is opening it up to more people and very on brand for the NYT assholes.
I use DDG, Protonmail and Apple because I have some expectation of privacy from them.
In my case it is not like this stuff that Yasha Levine called out as BS privacy concern:
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/all-effd-up-levine
Weirdly enough, this pro-Apple rally was prompted by a crime committed on the other side of the country. Nearly three months earlier, in December 2015, a Southern California couple who’d met online and bonded over shared dreams of jihad packed their SUV with machine guns, pistols, and rifles and mounted a terror raid on a nondescript nonprofit social service agency in the desert town of San Bernardino. It was a gruesome crime. The pair killed fourteen and wounded twenty-two before being gunned down themselves. The FBI, worried that the couple had been working with others, wanted Apple to unlock an iPhone belonging to one of the shooters. Apple had the ability to unlock the phone, but it refused—on principle. Apple CEO Tim Cook decided to turn this minor confrontation with authority into a major public relations spectacle—a high stakes drama in which Apple played the hero and defender of the people, throwing its sleek (designed in California, assembled in China) corporate body upon the wheels and gears of America’s odious government surveillance machine. In a letter to Apple customers, Cook claimed that providing even one-time access to the FBI in what was clearly a legitimate criminal investigation would forever endanger iPhone and cloud users around the world. Silicon Valley and big business—including Google, Facebook, Amazon, AT&T, eBay, and Intel—sided with Apple and backed it in court against the Department of Justice.
Yasha is of course spot on as usual. That shit is pathetic as this attention seeker lauded by the Google creeps:
https://www.pcmag.com/news/artist-manipulates-google-maps-traffic-view-with-cart-full-of-smartphones
That “artist” is a sleazy douchebag. Here’s a hint-if Google gushes over it, it’s not real.
I mostly hope to not be kicked out of polite society entirely and that’s it.
But I do strive for privacy where I can find it to pushback against those sleazy oligarchs. Guys like Musk use doxxing as a weapon against people when they can:
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/grok-doxxing
Earlier this week, Futurism reported that xAI’s Grok appeared to accurately dox the address of Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy when asked by random X users.
And it turns out that the foulmouthed bot isn’t just doxxing celebrities: a Futurism review found that the free web version of Grok will, with extremely minimal prompting, provide accurate residential addresses for non-public figures — a feature that could easily assist stalking, harassment, and other dangerous types of behavior.
Musk himself is known for this vicious shit:
https://www.alternet.org/elon-musk-federal-employees/
That would have been traumatizing. I am not a public figure and never will be and know how vile that shit is. And when someone has to be one for work like a public health official, this shit discourages any expert you want and encourages the attention seeking, child like grifters and kakistocrats I saw references to earlier.
A reality show world doesn’t work for most actual professionals even if we don’t work in classified work or abstain for political engagement.
I don’t want to draw more attention to the people in these stories or peopel like Dr Fauci. But just point out the campaign of terror these noxious guys are engaged in with poor data hygiene and other privacy violations that have escalated and accelerated over time to the point where we have to pushback asap. It’s so many of us know that it has hit critical mass.
(And all this while pathetically whining about being doxxed himself.)
There needs to be a full scale pushback against these fascists. I saw a post by a DUer, I think Marble Falls, a few days ago “piggies get fed, hogs get slaughtered”.
When these tech oligarchs are launching a a full scale attack on citizenry and no one in the media or politics etc calls it out connecting the dots anywhere near as much as needed or in any way that can result in serious pushback, it’s up to us to not take it anymore.
These guys have been overreaching for years and it’s enough. These psychological effects of this shit are so damaging for one’s cognition. Humans need privacy to work and live and no one trusts these parasites or their fucking enablers anymore.
If a formerly lamer person like me is any indicator of the mood of a type of at least superficially more buttoned down and conventional seeming person, these turds are in for serious pushback. And not the in-house shill middle of the road bullshit.
I finally know what that means..I am mad as hell and I won’t take it anymore..
