This is a research prototype. The data and analyses are preliminary and not yet validated — we'd welcome your .
The Chicago Tribune and The New York Times have filed separate federal lawsuits against Perplexity AI, alleging copyright infringement and false attribution. The publishers claim that Perplexity's AI-powered search engine and chatbot scrape and reproduce their content without authorization, diverting web traffic and revenue. Furthermore, the lawsuits allege that the AI system generates inaccurate information (hallucinations) and falsely attributes these errors to the newspapers, potentially damaging their reputations.
The Chicago Tribune filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Perplexity AI unlawfully reproduced and paraphrased its copyrighted journalism in generative chatbot and search outputs. The complaint claims the AI system produced substitutive answers that bypassed links to the Tribune's website, diverted revenue, and at times hallucinated inaccurate information falsely attributed to the newspaper.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI systems capable of creating economic or cultural value, including through reproduction of human innovation or creativity (e.g., art, music, writing, coding, invention), destabilizing economic and social systems that rely on human effort. The ubiquity of AI-generated content may lead to reduced appreciation for human skills, disruption of creative and knowledge-based industries, and homogenization of cultural experiences.
Also classified as
The AI system generates inaccurate results (hallucinations) and falsely attributes them to the newspapers, demonstrating a lack of robustness.
Perplexity's unauthorized reproduction of original journalism devalues human creative effort and threatens the financial viability of the news industry by diverting traffic and ad revenue.
Human
Due to a decision or action made by humans
Intentional
Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed
The risk of copyright infringement stems from intentional human decisions by Perplexity's developers to scrape publisher content and design a business model that bypasses original links.
Added categories peak at 2: Minor (Epistemic Harm, Direct)
Major US news publishers have sued Perplexity AI for copyright infringement and trademark dilution. While the incident poses minor risks to economic security of the media sector and could cause epistemic harm through false attributions of AI hallucinations, it has negligible direct national security implications.
Perplexity AI is described as an AI-powered search engine and chatbot that delivers complete responses to user queries, augmenting human information-seeking capabilities under human oversight.
Limited Risk: The system is characterized as a chatbot and generative search engine, which falls under the transparency obligations for chatbots and AI-generated content.
Perplexity AI is designed to answer user queries directly by scraping and summarizing web content, acting as an 'answer engine'.
The reports are detailed, from reputable news sources, and clearly outline the legal allegations, the mechanics of Perplexity's scraping, and the specific harms of copyright infringement and brand damage from hallucinations.
None
Technology
Generative AI Hallucinations
AI generates fabricated info and attributes it to publishers, damaging brand.
Substitutive Outputs
AI produces outputs identical or highly similar to original news articles.
Link-Bypassing Chatbot
Chatbot design encourages users to skip visiting the original source website.
Data Inputs
Unlicensed Web Scraping
System scraped millions of copyrighted stories, videos, and images.
Aggressive Data Collection
AI models hoover up all online data to stay competitive in a cutthroat market.
Human Factors
Dismissive Corporate Attitude
Communications head shrugged off lawsuits as typical resistance to new tech.
User Avoidance of Source Links
Users bypass original journalism sites, preferring consolidated AI summaries.
Process and Methods
Lack of Content Licensing
Failed to negotiate licensing or revenue sharing deals with publishers.
No Output Verification Process
System lacks mechanisms to prevent attributing false facts to news brands.
Management
Prioritizing Growth Over Ethics
Focused on rapid scaling and valuation over ethical data acquisition.
Aggressive Sales Pitching
Marketed products using 'skip the links' to actively divert publisher traffic.
Regulatory Environment
Unclear Fair Use Boundaries
Legal limits of fair use for AI training and data reuse are highly ambiguous.
Outdated Copyright Legislation
Current copyright acts do not clearly govern generative AI outputs.
AI system involved
Identified by automated extraction; can differ from the alleged developers above.
