One of the nation’s largest newspapers is targeting another AI firm for reusing its content without its permission. The Wall Street Journal reported that the New York Times sent a cease and desist letter to Perplexity, the AI startup funded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The letter states that Perplexity’s use of the New York Times’ content to create answers and summaries with its AI portal violates copyright law. The letter states that Perplexity and its backers “have been unjustly enriched by using, without authorizations, The Times’ expressive, carefully written and researched, and edited journalism without a license” and gave the startup until October 30 to respond before taking legal action.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told the Journal that they aren’t ignoring the notice. He added they are “very much interested in working with every single publisher, including the New York Times.”
This isn’t the first time an AI company has earned the wrath of the New York Times’ legal team. The newspaper took OpenAI and Microsoft to court over claims that both used articles from its pages to train its AI software. The suit alleges both companies used more than 66 million records across its archives to train its AI modes representing “almost a century’s worth of copyrighted content.”
Amazon Web Services’ cloud division also started an investigation over the summer into Perplexity AI. Wired reported that a machine hosted on Amazon Web Services and operated by Perplexity visited hundreds of Condé Nast publications and properties hundreds of times to scan for content to use in its response and data collections.
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