Perplexity, the $18 billion AI ‘answer machine,’ wants to play nice with news publishers. They keep suing it anyway

They keep suing it anywayBy Beatrice NolanBy Beatrice NolanReporterBeatrice NolanReporterBeatrice Nolan is a reporter at Fortune covering

Beatrice previously worked as a reporter at Insider, covering stories AI and Big

She's based in Fortune's London office and graduated from the University of York with a bachelor's degree in English.SEE FULL BIO Perplexity is facing a wave of copyright lawsuits from publishers around the world.AI engine Perplexity is facing a new headache amid its fraught relationship with publishers: another copyright lawsuit

The suit is filed on behalf of two of Japan’s largest media groups, Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun, and accuses the company of copying and storing article content and ignoring a “nical measure” designed to prevent this from happening

The lawsuit is a setback to the AI engine’s efforts to play nice with online publishers, especially media organizations, whose content it heavily relies on to duce its AI answers

Perplexity’s AI-powered “answer machine” crawls websites to access content, then uses that material to generate concise answers for users that include citations

The answers summarize information from multiple sources, including news

Many news publishers however worry that the rise of AI engines such as Perplexity could be an existential threat to the industry, diverting audiences away from their websites and undermining their advertising and subscription models

To try and assuage some of these concerns, Perplexity has signed revenue-sharing partnerships with outlets including Fortune, Time, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and the Los Angeles Times, and has mised to give partner organizations access to its enterprise tools to build their own AI ducts

Perplexity also recently launched a gram allowing publishers to revenue generated from their content through its Comet web browser and AI assistant

Publishers will earn money when their drive traffic through Comet, appear in queries, or assist users via the AI assistant

Allegations of ignoring no-crawling signs Perplexity, which was founded in 2022, was last valued at $18 billion in a July funding round

The company regularly speaks of the importance of journalism for its duct

Jessica Chan, the company’s head of publishing partnerships, previously told Fortune that the company needs a “thriving journalism and digital publishing ecosystem” and “continual duction” of journalistic information to succeed. “There is really no world in which Perplexity is successful but publishers are not,” she said

However, these efforts haven’t managed to prevent a growing list of media companies from pursuing legal action against the AI startup

Perplexity has faced legal threats from the BBC for scraping and verbatim use of content without consent, as well as Forbes and Wired for republishing prietary content without citation

It’s also currently battling a copyright suit from News Corp’sDow Jones and The New York Post

Just last week, the company failed to convince a New York federal court to dismiss or transfer the News Corp lawsuit

The News Corp case and the lawsuit brought by Nikkei and Asahi make similar claims but will be assessed under different copyright law

In Japan, AI training on existing copyrighted works is partially permitted, but restrictions apply when content is copied or stored without consent or when publishers’ nical safeguards are ignored

In contrast, U.S. copyright law generally offers stronger tections for publishers, with courts scrutinizing reduction and commercial use of content

Nikkei and Asahi’s lawsuit also claims that Perplexity has damaged the papers’ credibility by viding incorrect summaries and information falsely attributed to the newspapers’ , violating the Unfair Competition Prevention Act, a Japanese law that hibits various forms of unfair competition to ensure fair practices in the market and tect es from misconduct such as misleading advertising

In a statement d with the Financial Times, which is owned by Nikkei, the financial newspaper accused the company of “’free riding’ on article content that journalists from both companies have spent immense time and effort to re and write,” while paying no compensation

The crawling issue has also caused friction between Cloudflare and Perplexity

The cybersecurity company has also alleged that Perplexity is bypassing websites’ no-crawling requests by disguising its identity, making it appear as though the traffic is coming from a different source

Cloudflare investigated the AI startup after customers reported that Perplexity was ignoring robots.txt directives

Perplexity did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for

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