CNN has taken Perplexity AI to court, alleging the AI startup’s tools produce “verbatim” copies of the news network’s journalism and serve up paywalled content to users for free. The suit, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, represents another significant escalation in the war between legacy media and the AI companies feeding on their work.
The complaint accuses Perplexity of deliberately circumventing CNN’s technical measures designed to block its web crawlers. “Human beings report, research, write, edit, and create the content that Perplexity takes without permission or compensation,” the lawsuit states.
A pattern, not an incident
CNN isn’t the first major publisher to drag Perplexity into court, and it almost certainly won’t be the last. The New York Times filed its own copyright suit against the company in December 2025. Dow Jones, The New York Post, and Encyclopaedia Britannica have all lodged similar complaints.
The core allegation is remarkably consistent across these cases: Perplexity’s AI answer engine and its Comet browser pull content from across the web, synthesize it into responses, and deliver it to users. Publishers argue this amounts to wholesale theft, particularly when the output closely mirrors the original reporting or bypasses subscription gates.
