By Dawn Chmielewski and Katie Paul

(Reuters) – Dow Jones and media baron Rupert Murdoch's New York Post filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI on Monday, claiming the artificial intelligence startup was making “massive illegal copies” of their copyrighted works.

The lawsuit is the latest salvo in a bitter ongoing dispute between publishers and technology companies over how the latter can use copyrighted content without permission to build and operate their AI systems.

“This lawsuit is brought by news publishers seeking redress for Perplexity's brazen scheme to compete for readers while exploiting the valuable content the publishers produce,” says the lawsuit, which is filed by The Wall Street Journal's parent company, Dow Jones. in the Southern District of New York and the NY Post.

Perplexity did not immediately respond to emails from Reuters seeking comment.

The AI ​​company is among the leading startups trying to eradicate the search market dominated by Alphabet's Google. It compiles information from websites it deems authoritative and then provides a summary directly in Perplexity's own tool.

Perplexity uses a variety of large language models (LLMs) to generate its summaries, from OpenAI to Meta's open source Llama model. It includes citations in these results, although Perplexity's own marketing promotes the idea that its interface allows users to “skip the links.”

Google also now displays AI-generated summaries similar to Perplexity's, although most publishers are reluctant to accept this arrangement, as opting out would also mean their content would be removed from Google search results, making it virtually invisible online.

The news publishers are trying to distinguish Perplexity from search engines, which they say enable discovery of their work, not a replacement for it, the lawsuit says.

In the lawsuit, News Corp publishers allege that their journalists researched and wrote stories under tight deadlines and unpredictable circumstances. There is great demand for high-quality news presented in a timely, easily digestible format, and these publications rely on advertising and subscription sales to cover the costs of journalism, they argue.

The news organizations claim that Perplexity's AI-generated “answer engine” ingested their proprietary news, analysis and opinions into an internal database to generate answers to user questions.

In its effort to provide answers, Perplexity copied “large” amounts of publishers' work into a database that uses an AI technique called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to provide answers to user queries, the lawsuit says.

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