Perplexity sued by Japanese media giants for stealing information and presenting false information

Another day, another instance of AI companies purportedly engaging in copyright infringement. Two Japanese media groups, Nikkei and the Asahi Shimbun, are suing Perplexity for illicitly having “copied and stored article content” from the pair’s servers, the Financial Times reports. Nikkei owns the Financial Times.

The two media groups claim Perplexity supplied inaccurate information and credited these falsehoods to the companies. “If left unchecked, this situation could undermine the foundation of journalism, which is committed to conveying facts accurately,” Nikkei and the Asahi Shimbun, which filed a joint lawsuit, stated.

Each company requests 2.2 billion yen ($15 million) in damages and for Perplexity to remove any stored articles. “Perplexity’s actions amount to large-scale, ongoing ‘free riding’ on article content that journalists from both companies have spent immense time and effort to research and write, while Perplexity pays no compensation,” Nikkei said in a statement.

Ironically, this news comes just one day after Perplexity announced a new revenue-sharing plan for publishers. It’s using a new Comet Plus subscription that provides users with “premium content from a group of trusted publishers and journalists” for $5 per month.

Publishers are poised to get 80 percent of the revenue, initially receiving payment out of a $42.5 million pool. However, that means a subscription gives publishers $4 for turning over their entire library, a significant decrease from the $20 to $30 many newspapers now charge for access.

Perplexity’s current Publisher Program provides shares of ad revenue that a publisher might have received if users clicked on their articles, rather than reading Perplexity’s summary.

These moves create the appearance of Perplexity trying to act above board, but the most recent lawsuit isn’t the first time reports have emerged of Perplexity raking websites’ content without permission. It’s not even the first time this month.

An early August report from Cloudfare found that Perplexity has allegedly deployed web crawlers to sneak around robots.txt files and firewalls. Cloudfare claims that Perplexity is impersonating Google Chrome with a generic browser and rotating through IP addresses not linked to the company.

Perplexity also faced a series of accusations in the summer of 2024. Forbes accused the company of illicitly pulling its stories and publishing them, while Wired reported that Perplexity was scraping content from it and other Condé Nast-owned publications.