The New York Times has escalated its legal battle against the AI startup Perplexity, as it’s now suing the AI “answer engine” for allegedly producing and profiting from responses that are “verbatim or substantially similar copies” of the publication’s work.

The lawsuit, filed in a New York federal court on Friday, claims Perplexity “unlawfully crawls, scrapes, copies, and distributes” content from the NYT. It comes after the outlet’s repeated demands for Perplexity to stop using content from its website, as the NYT sent cease-and-desist notices to the AI startup last year and most recently in July, according to the lawsuit. The Chicago Tribune also filed a copyright lawsuit against Perplexity on Thursday.

The New York Times sued OpenAI for copyright infringement in December 2023, and lat

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