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Yes. The New York Times filed a federal lawsuit against Perplexity AI, Inc. on December 5, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The case, The New York Times Company v. Perplexity AI, Inc., No. 1:25-cv-10106-LAP, alleges that Perplexity copied and repackaged Times journalism and other content in commercial AI-answer products, including material the newspaper says was obtained from behind its paywall. Those allegations have not been proven.
What the lawsuit is
The original plaintiff was The New York Times Company. The March 20, 2026 first amended complaint also names Wirecutter, Inc. and The Athletic Media Company. Perplexity AI, Inc. is the defendant. The federal case is separate from The Times’ earlier litigation against OpenAI and Microsoft.
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The public docket is available at the Southern District of New York case page. The operative pleadings and motion practice may differ from the December 2025 filing, so a news report describing only the original complaint is incomplete.
What The Times alleges
Copying through an answer-engine system
According to the complaint, Perplexity’s retrieval-augmented-generation system allegedly crawled, copied, stored and reproduced Times material. The newspaper objects to answers that it says reproduce articles verbatim or nearly verbatim rather than merely pointing readers to the original story.
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Access to paywalled material
The Times alleges that Perplexity obtained or displayed content that should have been restricted to paying subscribers. Whether a particular page was public, paywalled, cached, supplied through a feed, or accessed despite technical restrictions is a factual question for the case.
Commercial substitution
The complaint characterizes Perplexity’s products as commercial services that can substitute for visiting The Times’ website, seeing its advertising or subscribing. The newspaper seeks to establish that use of its work without permission or payment damages existing and potential licensing, traffic and subscription markets.
Video, podcasts, images and related works
The allegations extend beyond written articles. Coverage of the filing describes claims involving videos, podcasts, images and other Times content. The precise works and counts must be taken from the operative amended complaint rather than inferred from a short news summary.
Inaccurate answers attributed to The Times
The Times also alleges that Perplexity sometimes generated false or inaccurate information while attributing it to The New York Times. That theory is distinct from copyright infringement: misleading attribution may support trademark, dilution, unfair-competition or reputational arguments, but a hallucinated statement does not by itself prove a copyright violation.
Claims and requested relief
The Times Company’s public filing describes claims for:
- Direct copyright infringement, including a theory focused on Perplexity’s outputs.
- Contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.
- Trademark infringement and trademark dilution.
- Monetary and injunctive relief, along with other relief available under the asserted claims.
Perplexity’s partial dismissal motions targeted the output-related direct-infringement theory, the contributory and vicarious claims, and the trademark claims. A motion to dismiss tests whether pleaded allegations are legally sufficient; it is not a finding that either side has proved its facts.
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Perplexity’s response
In comments reported by TechCrunch, Perplexity communications chief Jesse Dwyer rejected the broader idea that publisher lawsuits would stop new technology from developing. The company’s more consequential position is in its court filings: the docket records a partial motion to dismiss filed February 27, 2026, and a renewed partial motion filed April 17, 2026.
The legal questions that matter
Fair use
Perplexity may argue that searching, retrieving and generating answers is transformative or analogous to search. The Times is likely to emphasize commercial use, substantial reproduction of expressive reporting and alleged substitution for the original. Courts weigh four factors:
- The purpose and character of the use.
- The nature of the copyrighted work.
- The amount and substantiality of what was copied.
- The effect on actual or potential markets.
Commercial use is not automatically unlawful, and an AI system is not automatically protected by fair use. The case does not yet establish which factor will control.
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Access is not the same as reproduction
The technical chain can include crawl → index or cache → retrieve → generate → display. Publicly accessible pages, paywall-protected pages, search indexes, stored copies and licensed feeds raise different factual and legal questions. Crawling alone is not necessarily the same act as displaying a full article in an answer.
Outputs and expressive content
Even if a system lawfully accessed a page, a plaintiff may argue that an output reproduces protected expression or creates an infringing copy. Perplexity may respond that an answer is newly generated, that short factual statements receive narrower copyright protection than expressive reporting, or that isolated problematic outputs do not show systematic infringement. Facts and the wording used to report them are not identical for copyright purposes.
Secondary liability
The contributory and vicarious theories raise questions about knowledge, encouragement, control and financial benefit: for example, what Perplexity knew about allegedly infringing activity, how its crawlers and product instructions operated, and whether the company benefited from the conduct.
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Trademark and attribution
The false-attribution allegations concern possible consumer confusion, dilution or misleading association with The New York Times. Those issues should be analyzed separately from whether a particular passage is protected by copyright.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Procedural timeline
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| October 2024 | The docket lists Times letters dated March 29, May 10 and October 2, 2024, as exhibits to Perplexity’s motion papers. |
| December 5, 2025 | The Times filed the lawsuit in the Southern District of New York. |
| February 10, 2026 | The Times filed a corrected complaint. |
| February 27, 2026 | Perplexity filed a partial motion to dismiss. |
| March 20, 2026 | The Times Company, Wirecutter and The Athletic filed a first amended complaint. |
| March 25, 2026 | The parties held the Rule 26(f) conference, according to the case-management report. |
| April 17, 2026 | Perplexity filed a renewed partial motion to dismiss, according to The Times Company’s filing. |
| June 2, 2026 | The docket records the Rule 26(f) report and case-management plan, with fact discovery scheduled to close February 26, 2027. |
Status as of August 18, 2026
The Times Company reported that the case remained active and discovery had begun. The publicly available docket page records the June 2 case-management filing, but says it was last retrieved on that date. Therefore, it is not a reliable basis for claiming that no later order, ruling or filing occurred by August 18, 2026; a current PACER or court-docket check would be required. No source supplied here establishes a final merits judgment or a trial date.
How this differs from the OpenAI litigation
The Times’ OpenAI case centers heavily on alleged use of journalism to develop or train AI systems. The Perplexity case emphasizes real-time retrieval, copying, storage and reproduction in an AI-search product. A model’s training data, a search index, a cached page, a retrieved passage and a displayed answer are different technical acts, and a court may analyze them differently. The Times’ own corporate filing describes the OpenAI dispute as unauthorized copying and use in developing systems, while this case concerns alleged use in Perplexity products.
Evidence likely to shape the case
- Perplexity crawler logs, access records and technical instructions.
- Whether paywall-protected text was retrieved and how it was stored.
- Copies or caches maintained by Perplexity.
- User prompts, output logs and the degree of verbatim overlap.
- Whether allegedly infringing behavior was systematic or isolated.
- Publisher instructions, contracts, licensing discussions and revenue arrangements.
- Evidence of lost traffic, subscriptions, advertising or licensing opportunities.
- Ownership and copyright status of the specific works at issue.
Why publishers and AI companies are watching
The dispute tests whether answer engines can use publisher reporting at scale without licenses, whether links and citations provide meaningful compensation, and how much legal weight belongs to paywalls, robots.txt and other technical controls. It also bears on whether licensing, revenue-sharing programs or litigation become the industry’s dominant response. The Times’ action followed other publisher disputes with Perplexity, including cases brought by Dow Jones and the Chicago Tribune: Dow Jones docket and Chicago Tribune docket.
What happens next
The court must address the renewed dismissal motion while the parties conduct discovery. The case could involve further amended pleadings, settlement or licensing negotiations, additional motions and, if it survives, later merits proceedings. None of those outcomes is established by the filings currently identified.
The Bottom Line
The lawsuit is a live test of whether an AI answer engine may commercially retrieve and reproduce publisher content—including allegedly paywalled material—without a license, or whether those practices exceed copyright and trademark protections.
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