Overview

• Perplexity launched Comet Plus, a $5 monthly tier that pools subscription revenue and pays participating outlets 80% based on human visits, search citations, and agent actions through its Comet browser.
• An initial $42.5 million pool has been set aside for payouts, with Perplexity retaining 20% of subscription revenue; executives say initial checks have already been issued to partners.
• Nikkei and The Asahi Shimbun filed a joint lawsuit in Tokyo seeking injunctions and ¥2.2 billion each, alleging Perplexity copied and stored articles, ignored robots.txt protections, and attributed inaccuracies to their reporting.
• Perplexity contends its assistant retrieves pages at a user’s request rather than operating as a crawler, a stance challenged by prior accusations from Cloudflare and ongoing complaints from publishers.
• The rollout comes alongside continuing legal pressures including a News Corp case that survived a dismissal bid, as publishers such as Forbes, Condé Nast, the BBC, and Japan’s Yomiuri raise infringement concerns.