New York Times Sues Perplexity in Copyright Dispute

For more than a year now, publishers have been warning that AI “answer engines” could become a replacement for the reporting they summarize. Last week, this concern became part of a legal battle that may establish a limit for proper use of search powered by AI and a price tag for that use.

On December 5, 2025, The New York Times filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York against Perplexity AI. The New York Times argues that Perplexity AI reproduced, shared, and showed millions of NYT articles without permission in order to feed this content to its profiting AI tools, including content behind paywalls. This action also says that Perplexity made up responses and falsely presented those responses as being made by The New York Times by displaying NYT trademarks.

Perplexity pushed back with public comments. Their head of communications, Jesse Dwyer, described this lawsuit and others as a familiar cycle of old-school media attacking new technology. Perplexity has also said it is just indexing publicly available web page content and not using those contents to train their main models, placing itself closer to a search function with citations.

The 'Replacement' Argument

This, according to The Times, is not a hypothetical damage. As The Times sees it, Perplexity’s outputs may act as a “substitutive”, good enough for readers to need no access to The Times’ site. They might deprive The Times of revenue. This particular “replace the source” idea has become more and more common in cases about publishers challenging search products using AI.

This lawsuit also happens while Perplexity remains under growing pressure. A similar copyright lawsuit was filed by The Chicago Tribune a day before. This shows that publishers and newspapers are teaming up with similar complaints about how traffic remains hurt because of the use of AI responses. Perplexity remains under pressure in ongoing cases with Dow Jones and New York Post as well as cases with Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster.

The Technical & Legal Squeeze

The technical dispute that helped lead to this legal moment has also received a large amount of publicity. In August 2025, Cloudflare accused Perplexity of using stealth crawling techniques to get around “no crawl” rules. Perplexity defended against this claim, saying the problem they were trying to solve was separating user-controlled bots from traditional scrapers, and that Cloudflare's approach was too weak for modern assistant behavior.

Perplexity has tried to show its ability to co-exist with media business models. It launched a Publishers Program in July 2024 with publishers such as TIME Magazine, Der Spiegel, Fortune, and WordPress. The pitch was simple: a revenue share in ads or any other form of revenue and a more publisher-focused model for search via AI. However, the lawsuit filed by the Times shows this may no longer be enough for some publishers.

Why This Case Matters

This lawsuit brings together copyright protection, paywall value, and brand integrity into a single idea about the limits of AI search. A win for The New York Times might narrow the limits of “answer engines” which reproduce responses almost word-for-word, especially where such tools may blur the lines for readers about who wrote a work.

A win for Perplexity might widen the allowed use of browsing and summarization technology powered by AI, meaning one that sees this kind of use as extending access rather than competing with The New York Times.

In the near future, expect more legal action taken by publishers who believe search using AI directly violates their rights and more tests with licensing or revenue-sharing tried by firms who want to avoid this outcome altogether. The battle between The Times and Perplexity has become one of the key cases in deciding what form the open Internet might take in its next version.