Perplexity faces claims of massive copyright violation

Perplexity bills itself as an AI-empowered direct alternative to Google.

Whereas Google operates a search engine, Perplexity aims to operate an AI answer engine that allows users to “ask any question.” It then “searches the internet to give you an accessible, conversational, and verifiable answer,” per the company FAQ. If that sounds like an AI-enhanced version of search, you’d be right.

There’s no question that it’s been an unabashed hit since its launch in 2022. But it now finds itself facing litigation.

News Corp has officially filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI over accusations that the startup has committed copyright infringement on a “massive scale.” The suit, filed Monday, alleges that Perplexity lifted news, opinions and analysis directly from its Wall Street Journal and New York Post publications. This isn’t the first time the AI app has been under fire for its business practices, and it’s likely not going to be the last.

A new kind of search

Perplexity doesn’t use a proprietary AI, as Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google do. Those models have their own legal troubles, but Perplexity is different in that it relies on open-source and commercially available models to process the information it scrapes from the public web.

Perplexity’s value proposition is instead to insert itself between search and content producers as a middleman, training its AI on copyrighted content that its chatbot will then regurgitate (oftentimes…