Overview

• On August 7, Yomiuri Shimbun’s Tokyo, Osaka and Western headquarters filed a lawsuit in Tokyo District Court accusing U.S. AI startup Perplexity of unauthorized use of its content
• The complaint alleges Perplexity’s crawlers harvested about 119,467 Yomiuri articles between February and June 2025 despite robots.txt refusal settings
• Yomiuri alleges Perplexity infringed its reproduction and public transmission rights by copying articles and images without permission
• The publisher claims AI-generated summaries have led to zero-click searches that reduce visits to its sites and undermine advertising revenue
• This marks the first time a major Japanese news organization has sued an AI firm over content use, reflecting a global trend toward legal limits on generative AI