Media Companies vs. AI Firms: More Than 40 Lawsuits Challenge Big Tech’s Business Model
The journalism industry is escalating its legal battle against chatbot and artificial intelligence (AI) companies, with more than 40 lawsuits currently underway in U.S. courts. Media outlets such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal accuse giants like OpenAI, Microsoft, and the startup Perplexity of using their paywalled articles to generate competing content.
News organizations are now deeply embroiled in a major legal conflict with large technology companies and their AI-powered search engines. More than 40 cases are pending in U.S. courts, where publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Chicago Tribune allege massive copyright infringement by startups such as Perplexity and by tech heavyweights like OpenAI and Microsoft.
Publishers argue that AI systems use millions of journalistic articles — including paywalled content — to train their models and generate outputs that directly compete with the original reporting, threatening the sustainability of traditional journalism. Copyright-protected works — ranging from books and music to films and images — are often shared online as if they were in the public domain. However, the rise of chatbots, AI applications designed to interact in human-like ways, has opened a new front: newspaper and magazine reporting has become foundational training material for these systems.
AI models particularly value journalistic content for its clear, up-to-date language and, crucially, because it is reliable material that has undergone verification, fact-checking, and editorial review. As a result, the widespread use of protected journalistic content has quickly evolved into a serious global legal issue.
The New York Times Complaint
One of the latest lawsuits was filed earlier this month by The New York Times in federal court in New York against Perplexity, a multibillion-dollar AI startup. The newspaper alleges repeated and multifaceted copyright violations.
San Francisco–based Perplexity was founded in 2022 by a former OpenAI engineer and other entrepreneurs. It operates an AI-powered search engine built on the same underlying technology as ChatGPT. According to the complaint, the startup’s business model relies on scraping (using automated programs to extract data from websites) and copying content — including paywalled material — to power its generative AI products.
The Times claims Perplexity reproduced large excerpts, and in some cases entire articles, to generate answers to user queries. In the lawsuit, the newspaper stated: “Perplexity provides commercial products to its own users that substitute for The Times, without permission or compensation.”
The outlet also accuses Perplexity of brand damage. According to the filing, the startup’s search engine fabricated information — a phenomenon known as “hallucination” — and falsely attributed it to the newspaper by displaying it alongside its registered trademarks.
The Times said it had contacted the company several times over the past 18 months, demanding that it cease using its content until a licensing agreement could be negotiated. Perplexity, however, allegedly continued to use the material.
This marks the second lawsuit the Times has filed against AI companies. In 2023, it sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft, arguing that the companies trained their AI systems on millions of its articles without offering compensation. Microsoft and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, have consistently denied the allegations.
More Than 40 Cases
The New York Times lawsuit is the latest development in a growing legal battle between copyright holders and AI companies, encompassing more than 40 cases across the United States. The central question is whether the use of copyrighted works to train AI models and generate responses constitutes “fair use” or mass infringement.
Most lawsuits filed by copyright holders against AI companies over the past four years remain ongoing. However, legal pressure has already prompted significant developments. In September, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to authors and book publishers following a court ruling that found the company liable for illegally downloading and storing millions of protected works.
Meanwhile, some companies have opted for licensing agreements. In May, the New York Times signed a multi-year deal with Amazon granting the tech company a license to use its editorial content — including material from its cooking site, recipes, and sports coverage from The Athletic — to train its AI models. This marked the newspaper’s first licensing agreement with a generative AI firm.
Other news organizations have followed suit, signing similar agreements with companies such as OpenAI and Microsoft.
The Perplexity Case
In recent years, Perplexity has become a primary target in multiple legal disputes, facing similar allegations from several publishers as it aggressively seeks market share in the hypercompetitive generative AI sector.
The startup has attracted prominent investors, including Nvidia and Jeff Bezos, and has raised approximately $1.5 billion over the past three years through multiple funding rounds. It recently closed a $200 million round in September that valued the company at $20 billion.
Perplexity faces copyright infringement lawsuits from media outlets such as The Chicago Tribune and from Dow Jones publications, which owns The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post. The list of plaintiffs also includes Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Encyclopedia Britannica, and outlets such as Forbes and Wired, which have likewise accused the startup of plagiarizing their content.
Legal troubles extend beyond publishers. In October, Reddit filed a lawsuit in New York alleging that Perplexity unlawfully scraped its data to train its search engine. Even technology companies such as Amazon have taken legal action, accusing Perplexity of covertly accessing user accounts and masking its AI-driven browsing activity. The startup has denied both allegations, describing them as harassment.
The infringement accusations are compounded by a report from Cloudflare, a major digital infrastructure company, which earlier this year accused Perplexity of concealing its web-crawling activities and scraping websites without permission — actions with serious copyright implications.
Despite the wave of litigation, Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity’s head of communications, downplayed the lawsuits in a statement sent to The New York Times: “Publishers have been suing new technology companies for a hundred years — starting with radio, then television, the internet, social media, and now AI,” he said. “Fortunately, it never worked, or we’d all still be talking about this by telegraph.”
Source: elobservador
Author: Redacción
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