CNN sues Perplexity over ‘verbatim’ copycat articles

CNN just filed a lawsuit against Perplexity in New York, accusing the AI startup of generating verbatim copies of its reporting. The complaint also alleges that Perplexity gives users access to content that's supposed to be behind CNN's paywall.

This isn't just about a few scraped headlines. CNN claims Perplexity has been ignoring its attempts to block the company's crawlers from accessing its site. That means Perplexity allegedly kept scraping even after CNN tried to stop it.

The lawsuit gets to the heart of a growing tension in AI: who pays for the content these tools are trained on? CNN's complaint emphasizes that "human beings report, research, write, edit, and create the content that Perplexity takes without permission or compensation."

Perplexity offers an AI answer engine and recently launched an AI browser called Comet. Both products rely on pulling information from across the web to answer user queries, which is where the alleged copying comes in.

For anyone building or using AI tools, this case matters. It's another data point in the ongoing legal battle over whether AI companies can freely use copyrighted content for training and outputs. The outcome could shape how AI tools access and use published content going forward.

This follows similar legal challenges from other publishers who argue AI companies are essentially monetizing their work without paying for it. The case could set precedent for how AI answer engines operate and whether they need licensing deals with content creators.