Overview

• Perplexity set aside a $42.5 million pool for publishers tied to Comet Plus, its new $5 monthly subscription for the Comet AI browser.
• Payouts will be based on human visits, search citations, and agent actions when Perplexity’s tools surface or use a publisher’s content.
• Nikkei and The Asahi Shimbun seek injunctions and ¥2.2 billion (about $15 million) each, alleging copied and stored articles, ignored robots.txt, and inaccurate information attributed to their reporting.
• Perplexity says its assistant accesses pages at a user’s request rather than crawling sites, and a spokesperson expressed confidence that AI companies will prevail in court.
• Legal and technical pressure is mounting after a U.S. judge rejected Perplexity’s bid to dismiss a News Corp suit, and Cloudflare has accused the startup of circumventing crawler blocks, even as Perplexity points to existing publisher partnerships.