New York Times to Bezos-backed AI startup: Stop using our stuff

The publisher has sent generative-AI startup Perplexity a “cease and desist" notice demanding that the firm stop accessing and using its content, according to a copy of the letter reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The Times is already taking on another AI firm, ChatGPT creator OpenAI, with a lawsuit that is pending. It joins other publishers, including Forbes and Condé Nast, who have accused Perplexity of using their material without permission to generate AI search results.

Perplexity, which was launched two years ago and is backed by Jeff Bezos, is trying to mount a challenge against search behemoth Google. When users type questions or words into the search box on its website, it responds with AI-generated summaries, along with some featured sources and links.

The letter from the Times, sent through its law firm, said the way Perplexity is using its content, including to create summaries and other output, violates its rights under copyright law.

“Perplexity and its business partners have been unjustly enriched by using, without authorization, The Times’s expressive, carefully written and researched, and edited journalism without a license," the publisher wrote.

“We are very much interested in working with every single publisher, including the New York Times," Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said in an interview. “We have no interest in being anyone’s antagonist here."

Publishers are coming to terms with the massive implications of generative-AI technologies for their businesses. There are plenty of potential applications, from tools to analyze data and write headlines to entirely AI-generated articles. But news outlets also see substantial risks for misuse or theft of their content, which can damage businesses reliant on advertising and subscription revenue.

A number of media companies have signed sizable deals with OpenAI, including Journal parent News Corp, Dotdash Meredith parent IAC and Politico owner Axel Springer. OpenAI compensates the publishers in exchange for its use of their content.

Search is becoming a particularly sensitive issue, as users encounter AI-generated summaries from Google and rivals like Perplexity. The threat is that people who read those summaries won’t need to click through to an article.

The Times, like other news publishers, has tried to protect itself from technologies that artificial-intelligence companies use to scrape online content to improve their AI products. The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement late last year, saying the companies exploited its content to create their products, including OpenAI’s humanlike chatbot ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot.

OpenAI and Microsoft have denied infringing on the Times’s copyrights. They say the Times conducted tests in support of its suit that manipulated ChatGPT, by using prompts specifically designed to regurgitate content from Times articles.

In its letter to Perplexity, the Times asked the startup to provide information about how it is accessing the Times’s website despite the news outlet’s steps to prevent that access. Publishers can put code in their websites indicating that they don’t want their sites to be scraped.

Perplexity had previously assured the publisher that it would stop using “crawling" technology that ignores those guidelines, according to the letter. As of Oct. 2, when the Times sent the “cease-and-desist" letter, the content continued to show up in Perplexity search results.

Srinivas said Perplexity isn’t ignoring the Times’s efforts to block crawling of its site. He said the company plans on responding to the legal notice by the Times’s deadline of Oct. 30.

Perplexity has completed a handful of deals with individual publishers. Some media companies say the firm’s proposed terms are less attractive than the eight- and nine-figure licensing agreements OpenAI has offered.

Perplexity, which has said it processed 340 million searches in September—a fraction of Google’s search volume—plans to introduce ads later this month under its AI-generated answers, the Journal previously reported. The company has said it would share up to 25% of ad revenue with publishing partners whose content it uses, according to people familiar with the matter.

The startup, which doubled its valuation to about $1 billion with a new funding deal earlier this year, currently generates revenue mostly from a $20-a-month subscription offering that grants access to more-powerful AI technology.

Perplexity is sending a small but growing amount of traffic to individual publishers’ sites, according to data from digital measurement firm Similarweb. The number of referrals from Perplexity to the Times’s website is a fraction of the referrals the Times gets from Google, but the figure increased eightfold in the year ending August 2024.

In its exchange with Perplexity, Forbes accused the startup of going beyond crawling and using its content to create a story that was extremely similar to original Forbes reporting.

“Any unauthorized use of the Forbes’ Intellectual Property is a violation of Forbes’ intellectual property rights, depriving Forbes of those rights and threatening its reputation and goodwill for unique and informative articles," Forbes wrote in a notice to Perplexity in June.

Write to Alexandra Bruell at alexandra.bruell@wsj.com