CNN Sues Perplexity Over Verbatim Copying of Protected Articles

CNN has sued Perplexity in a New York court, accusing the AI company of systematically copying its content without permission. It is the latest battle in a growing fight between traditional media outlets and AI startups over copyright and control of intellectual property.

The specific allegations

According to the complaint, filed this week, Perplexity generates "verbatim" copies of CNN articles without permission or any compensation. The media company also claims the startup gives its users access to content protected by a paid subscription on CNN.com, and deliberately ignores the publisher's technical attempts to block its crawlers, the programs that automatically collect data from web pages.

CNN lists several specific ways in which Perplexity allegedly infringes its rights:

• Direct copying of article text without attribution or quotation
• Circumventing the blocks CNN set up in its robots.txt file
• Exposing paywalled content to users who are not subscribers
• Complete lack of compensation for CNN's authors, journalists and editors

The publisher's voice

"People write, research, edit and create content that

Perplexity takes without permission or compensation"

This line from the complaint captures the core of the dispute: AI companies use traditional media's intellectual property to train their models and to give end users ready-made answers. CNN's suit joins a series of legal actions media publishers have brought against companies such as OpenAI and Google over similar copyright violations.

What Perplexity is

Perplexity is a fast-growing AI startup that positions itself as an "answer engine," a next-generation search engine. Instead of simply returning a list of links, Perplexity uses large language models to generate full-text answers to users' questions.

The company has also built a browser called Comet, which embeds an AI assistant directly in the web interface. The browser lets users get answers from Perplexity on any page in real time. The startup is quickly gaining popularity, but it is doing so amid ongoing complaints from publishers about copyright infringement.

What comes next

The suit is another significant moment in the clash 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 work through such cases. The outcome of the CNN–Perplexity litigation could set an important precedent and force other AI companies to change how they collect and use data.