Letter sent to Perplexity AI but US-based firm calls corporation’s claims ‘manipulative and opportunistic’
The BBC is threatening legal action against Perplexity AI, in the corporation’s first move to protect its content from being scraped without permission to build artificial intelligence technology.
The corporation has sent a letter to Aravind Srinivas, the chief executive of the San Francisco-based startup, saying it has gathered evidence that Perplexity’s model was “trained using BBC content”.
The letter, first reported by the Financial Times, threatens an injunction against Perplexity unless it stops scraping all BBC content to train its AI models, and deletes any copies of the broadcaster’s material it holds unless it provides “a proposal for financial compensation”.
The legal threat comes weeks after Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, and the boss of Sky both criticised proposals being considered by the government that could let tech companies use copyright-protected work without permission.
