New York (CNN) — Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post sued Perplexity on Monday, accusing the generative AI company of illegally scraping its reporting and diverting traffic to its own platforms.
The News Corp-owned companies accused Perplexity of training its so-called answer machine using copyrighted material, using scraped content to generate responses to users’ questions, allowing them to circumvent news publishers’ websites.
“What Perplexity does not tout is that its core business model involves engaging in massive freeriding on Plaintiffs’ protected content to compete against Plaintiffs for the engagement of the same news-consuming audience, and in turn to deprive Plaintiffs of critical revenue sources,” the complaint alleges.
In a statement, Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp., said the AI company “perpetrates an abuse of intellectual property that harms journalists, writers, publishers and News Corp.”
“The perplexing Perplexity has willfully copied copious amounts …