Overview
- The complaint, filed December 5 in the Southern District of New York, seeks a jury trial, injunctive relief, damages and disgorgement.
- The Times alleges Perplexity copied and indexed millions of its articles, including paywalled content, to power an answer engine that can reproduce large portions of stories.
- The filing says Perplexity evaded blocks by using undeclared user agents, hidden IP addresses and third-party crawling tools after robots.txt and server-level blocks were imposed.
- The suit also claims trademark violations for pairing fabricated or misleading summaries with NYT, Wirecutter and The Athletic branding, citing a recalled-product example.
- Perplexity rejects the allegations and describes its service as indexing with citations, as related cases from the Chicago Tribune, Encyclopaedia Britannica and Reddit advance and reports value the startup near $20 billion.