Overview
- The Tribune filed the lawsuit on December 4 in New York federal court, alleging Perplexity unlawfully profited from the paper’s content.
- The complaint says Perplexity’s outputs are identical or substantially similar to Tribune stories, diverting traffic and undermining subscription and advertising revenue.
- It cites Perplexity’s chatbot, generative search, and Comet browser for providing full answers that bypass links to the Tribune’s site and its paywall.
- The filing alleges Perplexity’s retrieval-augmented systems use scraped Tribune articles without permission, and notes an October exchange where Perplexity’s lawyers denied training on Tribune work but said it may receive non-verbatim summaries.
- The suit claims inaccurate AI outputs have been attributed to the Tribune, seeks undisclosed damages and a permanent injunction, and comes alongside other publisher actions against AI firms including OpenAI, Microsoft, Reddit, and Dow Jones.