CNN Sues Perplexity for Verbatim Copying of Protected Articles

CNN has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity in New York court, accusing the AI company of systematically copying its content without permission. This is a new battle in the growing struggle between traditional media outlets and AI startups over copyright and intellectual property control.

Specific Accusations

According to the lawsuit filed this week, Perplexity generates "verbatim" copies of CNN articles without permission or compensation. The media company also claims that the startup provides its users with access to content protected by a paid subscription on CNN.com and deliberately ignores the publication's technical attempts to block its crawlers—programs that automatically collect data from web pages. CNN lists several specific ways in which Perplexity allegedly violates its rights:

• Direct copying of article text without attribution or citation
• Circumventing specially installed CNN blocks in the robots.txt file
• Disclosing paid content to users who are not subscribers
• Complete lack of compensation to CNN authors, journalists, and editors

The Publisher's Voice

"People write, research, edit, and create content that

Perplexity takes without permission or compensation"

This phrase from the lawsuit reflects the core of the problem: AI companies use traditional media's intellectual property to train their models and provide ready-made answers to end users. CNN's lawsuit joins a series of legal actions that media outlets are bringing against companies like OpenAI and Google for similar copyright violations.

What Is Perplexity?

Perplexity is a fast-growing AI startup that positions itself as an "answer engine"—a next-generation search engine. Rather than simply providing a list of links, Perplexity uses large language models to generate complete text answers to user questions. The company has also developed a browser called Comet, which embeds an AI assistant directly into the web interface. This browser allows users to get answers from Perplexity on any page in real time. The startup is rapidly gaining popularity, but this is happening against a backdrop of constant complaints from publishers about copyright violations.

What's Next?

This lawsuit is yet another important moment in the struggle between traditional media and the AI industry. The question of copyright in the era of large language models remains largely unresolved: courts are only beginning to hear such cases. The outcome of the CNN versus Perplexity legal proceedings could set an important precedent and force other AI companies to change their approaches to data collection and usage.