AI incident ·
The New York Times Sued Perplexity for Allegedly Using Copyrighted Content and Generating False Attributions
In brief
An AI system built and deployed by Perplexity Ai allegedly harmed Writers, The New York Times and 3 others.
- Risk domain
- Socioeconomic & Environmental Harms
- Occurred
- Coverage
- 6 reports
What happened
On December 5, 2025, The New York Times sued Perplexity, alleging the company used copyrighted Times articles without permission to train its AI system and generated outputs that reproduced Times content or falsely attributed fabricated information to the newspaper. The suit claims the conduct harmed the Times's business and brand. Perplexity denies wrongdoing.
Laws that address this harm
Policy angle: Classified under Socioeconomic & Environmental Harms (Economic and cultural devaluation of human effort) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.
- Colorado AI Act
- Framework Convention on AI (CETS 225)
- India DPDP Act
- Law on Artificial Intelligence (2025)
- Law No. 132/2025 on artificial intelligence
Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).
News reports (3)
Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
- Alleged deployer
- Perplexity Ai
- Alleged developer
- Perplexity Ai
- Alleged harmed party
- Writers, The New York Times, Publishers, Journalistic Integrity, Epistemic Integrity
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
- Risk domain
- Socioeconomic & Environmental Harms
- Risk subdomain
- 6.3 Economic and cultural devaluation of human effort
- Causal entity
- AI
- Intent
- Intentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
- Harm level
- —
- Sectors
- —
- Countries
- —
Risk entries describing this failure mode
Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 6.3.
- Cultural dispossession
"Cultural dispossession - Intentional and/or unintentional erasure of cultural goods and values, such as ways of speaking, expressing humour, or sounds and voices that contribute to a cultural identity, or their inapprop...
- Loss of creativity/critical thinking
"Loss of creativity/critical thinking - Devaluation and/or deterioration of human creativity, artistic ex- pression, imagination, critical thinking or problem-solving skills."
- Copyright infringement
"The use of large amounts of copyrighted data for training general- purpose AI models poses a challenge to traditional intellectual property laws, and to systems of consent, compensation, and control over data. The use o...
- Risks of copyright infringement
"The use of vast amounts of data for training general- purpose AI models has caused concerns related to data rights and intellectual property. Data collection and content generation can implicate a variety of data rights...
- Copyright Violation
"LLM systems may output content similar to existing works, infringing on copyright owners."
- Intellectual property rights violations
"This is an emerging category, with more cases prone to appear as the use of generative AI tools–such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, or ChatGPT–becomes more widespread. Some content creators are already suing for the a...
- Impact on Intellectual Property Rights
"The extent and effectiveness of legal protections for intellectual property have been thrown into question with the rise of generative AI. Generative AI trains itself on vast pools of data that often include IP-protecte...
- Copyright challenges (copyright-infringing output)
"Even though models generally create new outputs, it is possible that the content produced by a generative AI tool—such as an image, or even computer code— could turn out to be almost identical to that used in the traini...
Incidents in the same risk subdomain
- Seedance 2.0 Reportedly Generated Viral Tom Cruise–Brad Pitt Fight Video, Prompting Hollywood IP and Likeness Complaints
- Reported Disqualification of Two Books from the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Due to Alleged AI-Generated Cover Art
- Unauthorized AI Impersonation of George Carlin Used in Comedy Special
- GAN Artwork Won First Place at State Fair Competition
Other incidents involving Perplexity Ai
Source record: incident #1294 on the AI Incident Database · all 6 reports