Overview
- The New York Times filed a federal lawsuit in the Southern District of New York on Friday alleging Perplexity unlawfully scraped its site and reproduced paywalled articles, videos and podcasts in near‑verbatim form.
- The Chicago Tribune sued a day earlier in New York federal court, asserting Perplexity’s outputs are identical or substantially similar to its reporting and seeking damages and a permanent injunction.
- Both complaints target Perplexity’s retrieval‑augmented products, including the Comet browser, which the publishers say generate substitutive summaries that bypass their sites’ paywalls.
- The Times also alleges trademark violations, saying Perplexity’s tools fabricate information and falsely attribute it to the newspaper alongside its registered marks.
- Perplexity has disputed the characterizations in public statements and faces additional suits from Dow Jones, the New York Post, Reddit, Merriam‑Webster and Encyclopedia Britannica.