CNN has sued Perplexity, alleging the AI company infringed the news network’s copyrights and trademarks by illegally copying and distributing content without its consent.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, accused Perplexity of scraping more than 17,000 CNN stories, photos, videos and other content and using that to train its products. The complaint is the network’s first legal case against an AI company seeking to protect its copyrights — and is believed to the first litigation in this area by a TV network — though news companies including the New York Times, Dow Jones (publisher of the Wall Street Journal) and the New York Post have filed similar lawsuits against Perplexity. Other news publishers, including Time and USA Today Co. (formerly Gannett), have struck deals with the company.
A CNN spokesperson said that while the network “actively embraces the opportunities AI creates,” Perplexity “should not be able to steal from entities that create the original content” the company “exploits.” Meta announced a content-licensing deal with CNN last December.
“The public rely on high-quality news journalism reported by human beings to understand their world, which is frequently dangerous and expensive to produce,” the CNN rep said in a statement. “Commercial operators can and must pay to make use of it. We prefer that they do so through sensible licensing arrangements, but if they refuse to do that as Perplexity has so far refused to do, they will have to pay through legal damages. There is no free option.”
