The Chicago Tribune has formally filed a lawsuit against the AI search engine company Perplexity in a New York federal court, accusing it of scraping news content without authorization, bypassing paywalls, and directly providing original-level generated results in its products.

According to the complaint submitted by the Tribune, the newspaper's lawyers had already asked Perplexity in mid-October whether it used their content. Perplexity's lawyers responded that the company did not use the Tribune's articles as training data for its models, but "some factual summaries may have occurred." However, the Tribune's lawyers countered that Perplexity actually provided content very close to the original text, rather than simple summaries.

perplexity 1

The lawsuit also targets Perplexity's Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system. In theory, RAG technology is designed to reduce model bias by referencing verified data sources. However, the Tribune claims that Perplexity included its news content in the RAG data sources without permission. Additionally, the complaint states that Perplexity's Comet browser is suspected of bypassing paywalls and providing users with full summaries of the newspaper's articles.

Notably, the MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, which together own 17 news organizations, had previously sued OpenAI and Microsoft over training data issues in April this year; nine of these media outlets also launched similar lawsuits last November. This action shows that traditional media's concerns about AI companies using their content are deepening.

Currently, Perplexity has not responded to the Tribune's allegations or commented on TechCrunch's request for a statement. In addition to this case, Perplexity has recently faced similar legal challenges from Reddit, Dow Jones, and others; Amazon also issued a cease-and-desist notice, warning that its shopping-related AI browsing technology might be illegal.

As more media begin to focus on the boundaries between AI search engines and content scraping, this case may prompt courts to further examine the liability of RAG technology within the copyright legal framework.