Media baron Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones and the New York Post filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI on Monday, claiming the artificial intelligence startup is operating “massive illegal copies” of its 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 filed by The Wall Street Journal's parent company, Dow, in Southern District of New York filed by Jones and the New York 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. Citations are provided 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.

Perplexity phrases its responses in a way that sometimes conveys the content verbatim, the news organizations claim. The lawsuit alleges that these actions constitute unlawful copyright infringement.

“Perplexity is an abuse of intellectual property that harms journalists, authors, publishers and News Corp,” News Corp CEO Robert Thomson said in a statement.

With its lawsuit, News Corp joins several publishers who have sued AI companies for copyright infringement over the unauthorized use of content, both to train algorithms and to produce summaries of real-time information.

Earlier this month, the New York Times sent Perplexity a “cease and desist” letter demanding that it stop using the newspaper’s content for generative AI purposes.

Perplexity has also been accused by media organizations such as Forbes and Wired of plagiarizing their content, but has since launched a revenue share program to address some of publishers' concerns.

Some publishers enter into licensing agreements with AI companies willing to pay for content, although the sites often disagree about the value of the materials. Many AI developers argue that they have not broken any laws by providing free access.

In May, News Corp announced it had entered into a multi-year partnership with OpenAI. Thomson praised the tech company for understanding “that integrity and creativity are essential” to realizing the potential of artificial intelligence.