The Chicago Tribune has launched a federal lawsuit against Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine, alleging widespread copyright infringement and unauthorized use of the newspaper’s journalism. The case, filed in a New York federal court, adds to a growing wave of legal challenges facing AI companies over how they source and distribute news content.
According to the complaint, Tribune lawyers reached out to Perplexity in October seeking clarification about whether the platform was using the newspaper’s reporting in its systems. Perplexity’s legal team reportedly responded that its models were not trained on Tribune content, though it “may receive non-verbatim factual summaries.” The Tribune disputes this claim, asserting that Perplexity is generating responses that include sections of Tribune articles nearly word-for-word.
A significant focus of the lawsuit centers on Perplexity’s use of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), a technique designed to reduce AI hallucinations by pulling from verified, external sources. The Tribune argues that Perplexity is scraping its articles without permission and incorporating them into the RAG pipeline. This, the complaint says, results in the AI delivering detailed and accurate material derived directly from copyrighted journalism.
The lawsuit also accuses Perplexity’s Comet browser of circumventing the Tribune’s paywall to access and summarize subscriber-only content. If proven, this could raise major legal questions about AI tools that extract data from restricted web pages and reproduce it for users without authorization.
This case joins a broader legal battle involving MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, which together represent 17 news outlets currently suing major AI developers. Earlier this year, eight publications filed suit against OpenAI and Microsoft, with nine more joining in November. These cases collectively challenge the legality of using copyrighted news articles to train AI models and generate summaries.
Beyond the Tribune lawsuit, Perplexity is facing other legal scrutiny. Reddit filed suit in October, and Dow Jones has also taken legal action. Amazon issued a cease-and-desist letter last month, warning the AI browser to stop using its shopping and product information without permission.
The outcome of these cases may set critical precedents for how AI companies access, process, and distribute news content. It could also determine the boundaries of legal responsibility for RAG technologies and the future relationship between journalism and generative AI.
