A Manhattan federal judge on Friday refused to dismiss the core of Reddit’s lawsuit against Perplexity AI, allowing the platform to pursue claims that the AI search startup illegally bypassed technical protections to scrape Reddit content without paying for a license.

The ruling doesn’t determine whether Perplexity broke the law. But it does keep alive a legal theory that could prove as important as copyright in the battle over AI training data: that circumventing a platform’s access controls can itself create liability.

U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer ruled that Reddit can continue pursuing claims that Perplexity and three data scraping companies unlawfully bypassed protections designed to limit automated access to Reddit content, according to Reuters. He also found that Reddit has standing to sue over the alleged misuse of posts created by its users.

The defendants include Lithuania-based Oxylabs, Russia-based AWMProxy and Texas-based SerpApi. Reddit alleges the companies extracted its content from billions of search results without permission and that Perplexity worked with at least one of them to obtain the data. Perplexity, which does not license Reddit’s content, denies the allegations.

While Engelmayer dismissed several secondary claims, he allowed Reddit’s central allegations—including conspiracy and unlawful circumvention—to move forward.

Perplexity argues Reddit is attempting to control access to publicly available webpages it doesn’t own, using security measures it didn’t create and on behalf of users who never authorized the lawsuit. The company says it will continue defending what it calls the open internet.

Reddit argues the issue isn’t whether its content is publicly visible but whether companies deliberately bypassed technical barriers to collect it at scale without permission or compensation.

SerpApi attorney Jeff Homrig echoed that view, arguing the company accesses public search results rather than Reddit itself and that publicly available information doesn’t become proprietary simply because a platform later decides to charge for access.

That distinction could have broad consequences across the AI industry.

Reddit has transformed its user-generated content into a licensing business, striking deals with Google and OpenAI while describing itself in court filings as the most frequently cited source in AI-generated answers. If companies can obtain the same data by scraping around access controls, the value of those licensing agreements is diminished.

The lawsuit is one of a growing number testing how AI companies acquire training data. Authors, record labels, news publishers and other content owners have all sued AI developers over the use of copyrighted material. Reddit is also pursuing a separate lawsuit against Anthropic in California state court over similar scraping allegations.

For publishers, platforms and AI companies, Friday’s ruling is significant because it points beyond copyright. A favorable ruling on Reddit’s circumvention claims could give content owners another legal lever to protect their data—and strengthen their hand in negotiating AI licensing agreements.

The case is still in its early stages. But by allowing the core scraping and circumvention claims to proceed, the Southern District of New York has signaled that the next major battleground over AI training data may not be copyright alone. It may be whether AI companies can legally get around the digital gates content owners have built.

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The Delhi High Court handed OpenAI a major legal victory Friday, ruling that the company’s use of news agency ANI’s articles to train ChatGPT does not infringe copyright because it qualifies as fair reporting for research purposes under India’s Copyright Act, Reuters reported.

It is the first substantive court finding in India on whether AI companies can train large language models on copyrighted news content without a license. That question is still open in courtrooms in the United States and Canada, where OpenAI faces similar suits.

ANI first sued OpenAI in November 2024, alleging the company trained ChatGPT on its copyrighted news reports without permission and that the chatbot falsely attributed fabricated stories to the agency. Presiding over the ANI v. OpenAI lawsuit, Delhi High Court Justice Amit Bansal rejected the copyright claim, finding that ANI failed to prove ChatGPT had memorized or reproduced its articles in response to users.

The judge also rejected ANI’s claim over OpenAI’s storage of its articles, ruling that retaining the content for AI training is protected as research under India’s Copyright Act of 1957 and does not infringe the agency’s copyright.

The ruling contrasts with ongoing litigation in the United States, where The New York Times, the Center for Investigative Reporting and a growing number of publishers argue that OpenAI’s use of copyrighted material for AI training violates U.S. copyright law. Unlike India’s fair-dealing framework, which lists specific permitted uses, U.S. courts evaluate fair use case by case. In Canada, a coalition of Canadian news organizations, including CBC and The Globe and Mail, is testing a separate copyright framework in its own lawsuit against OpenAI.

The decision could reshape negotiations between AI developers and publishers in India, where the threat of copyright litigation may carry less weight after the ruling, It could reduce pressure on OpenAI and other AI companies to pursue licensing agreements with Indian news organizations, even as similar disputes continue elsewhere.

The ruling is not the final word in the case. It addresses ANI’s claims at this stage of the proceedings, and appeals remain possible. The judge’s finding on reproduction was also based on the evidence presented by ANI, not a broader conclusion that AI systems can reproduce copyrighted material.

Even so, India has become the first major jurisdiction to find that training AI models on copyrighted news content can qualify as protected research. As courts in the United States and Canada continue to weigh similar claims under different copyright laws, the divergence in legal approaches is becoming increasingly difficult for AI companies and publishers to ignore.

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OpenAI is putting another $5 million and $3 million in technology credits behind the American Journalism Project over the next two years, executives told Axios in an exclusive report. The renewal extends a partnership that began in 2023, when the company committed $5 million in funds and another $5 million in credits to the nonprofit.

That original deal helped launch AJP’s Product & AI Studio, which helps nonprofit local outlets build AI-powered products and workflows. In its first run, AJP delivered direct grants to 31 of its 50-plus portfolio organizations across 38 states. With the new money, CEO Sarabeth Berman says AJP plans to fund more of its newsroom partners while broadening access to ChatGPT’s enterprise products.

Tom Rubin, OpenAI’s chief of intellectual property and content, framed the arrangement as mission-driven rather than commercial. “These partnerships are consistent with our mission and have demonstrated great success,” he told Axios. “We’re committed to them because they demonstrate that the technology can benefit society.”

Member newsrooms used the funding on things reporters and fundraisers deal with every day: donor communications, data analysis, translation and civic information tools for readers. The next stage moves past one-off experiments toward shared products and infrastructure that smaller newsrooms could use together, according to AJP.

AJP is one of several local news bets OpenAI has placed. The company runs an AI collaborative and fellowship with the Lenfest Institute for Journalism that backs metro publishers including the Philadelphia Inquirer, Minnesota Star Tribune and the Seattle Times. It funded an expansion of Axios Local into new markets in 2025, and it provides grants and training to newsrooms in the global trade group WAN-IFRA.

The timing matters because OpenAI is buying goodwill with publishers while fighting them in court. It faces copyright suits from the New York Times and from eight newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital, part of a broader wave of legal disputes over how AI systems use published work. Other firms have been slower to sign licensing deals, and some, including OpenAI backer Microsoft, are exploring models that would pay publishers per use instead.

For newsrooms weighing whether to take this kind of money, the opportunity comes with tradeoffs. Grants and credits lower the cost of experimenting with AI, but they come from a company that news organizations are also suing over training data. The tools that help a local outlet translate coverage or draft donor emails are built by the same industry accused of scraping journalism without permission.

“Deploying AI effectively is ultimately a leadership challenge,” Berman said. “News organizations really have to think about how they smartly integrate these technologies in ways that have good policies, have humans in the lead and support the journalistic quality of the news organizations.”

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News Corp has fired back at Brave Software, filing a countersuit that accuses the search company of “flagrant theft” for distributing and selling copies of Wall Street Journal and New York Post articles to AI companies. The Tuesday filing in an Oakland, California, federal court escalates a legal fight Brave started more than a year ago, as reported by Reuters.

Brave sued News Corp preemptively in March 2025, asking a court to declare that bundling copyrighted articles for licensing and resale is not copyright infringement. It filed after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from the Rupert Murdoch-controlled publisher. Brave revised its complaint in May 2026, following what News Corp described as failed negotiations for a market-based licensing deal.

Now News Corp is on offense. In its filing, the company argued that Brave’s “covert scraping” and resale of copyrighted articles fall “nowhere near the bounds” of fair use.

“The more content Brave copies and sells, the more revenue it generates, and the less incentive AI companies have to negotiate licenses with the publishers who produced the content,” the lawsuit said. “Brave profits while publishers are cut out.”

News Corp wants an injunction, unspecified monetary damages and statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringement. CEO Robert Thomson framed the case bluntly, saying Brave’s conduct showed “blatant disregard” for how information gets disseminated.

“This era of tacky tech trafficking must come to an end if journalism is to have a sustainable future,” he said.

Brave sees itself as the underdog. It has described itself as the smallest of three U.S. companies running independent search engines at scale, behind Google and Microsoft’s Bing. In its own filings, Brave argued that indexing News Corp content to make it searchable, and serving users snippets and “high-level summaries,” qualifies as fair use. It also accused News Corp of threatening to disrupt generative AI, which it called what many consider “the most important innovation so far this century.”

The dispute is one piece of growing litigation over copyrighted content and AI training. The New York Times’ ongoing case against OpenAI and Microsoft remains the highest-profile example, and courts have yet to settle what fair use means when publisher content feeds AI systems. The New York Post, Dow Jones and News Corp’s British and Australian operations are all defendants in Brave’s suit.

For publishers, the fight matters beyond News Corp’s balance sheet. Brave’s business model depends on packaging searchable web content into a data feed that AI developers can buy. If that survives a fair-use challenge, it undercuts the licensing deals publishers have been signing with AI firms. If it doesn’t, intermediaries selling scraped content face steep liability.

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OpenAI’s first piece of consumer hardware is reportedly a screenless, mobile AI companion that syncs with ChatGPT and is being pitched internally as a humanlike AI companion that lives in the home.

That description comes from a Bloomberg report published Tuesday, which TechCrunch summarized the same day. The device is still under development, and its sources describe it as something well outside the standard smart-speaker mold.

The speaker reportedly has a personality and can learn about its owner over time to deliver more personalized responses. It would tap into a user’s digital life, pulling from sources like email. And it apparently includes mechanical elements that can move on their own, designed to feel like a companion and act as a physical manifestation of ChatGPT.

OpenAI announced prototypes for hardware in November 2025, with earlier rumors pointing to a phone that would compete directly with Apple. The company also acquired io, the hardware startup co-founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive, in a deal valued at roughly $6.5 billion. Bloomberg reports the speaker was built with help from ex-Apple engineers who worked on the iPhone and Mac.

That pedigree is now a legal liability. Apple sued OpenAI last week, accusing it of stealing trade secrets and calling the allegations “the tip of the iceberg.” OpenAI denies wrongdoing. Its sources told Bloomberg the new product veers significantly from anything Apple sells today.

OpenAI is not alone in chasing this category. Hark, the AI lab founded by Brett Adcock, raised an oversubscribed $700 million Series A in May at a $6 billion valuation to build proprietary models paired with custom hardware it calls a universal interface between humans and machines. Hark has yet to disclose the device’s design, highlighting the surge of investment flowing into AI hardware long before products ship.

For newsrooms and publishers, a screen-free device that pulls from email and learns a user’s habits raises the same questions as any voice-first platform. If people increasingly ask a companion device for news instead of opening an app or a browser, distribution shifts again, and this time to a surface with no visible headlines, no scannable feed and no obvious place for a byline.

The referral traffic problem publishers already face with chatbots gets sharper when the interface is spoken. The reported device would extend a broader shift in news discovery, making AI assistants an even more prominent intermediary between publishers and their audiences.

OpenAI has not announced the product, its price or when it will ship. Still, the reported device points to the company’s broader strategy of extending ChatGPT beyond screens and into the home.

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A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, delivered a sharp rebuke to the artificial intelligence industry Monday, accusing major tech companies of building their AI products on “brazen theft” of journalism and calling on news organizations worldwide to push back before it’s too late.

In a speech at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress, Sulzberger argued that AI companies are systematically strip-mining news content without permission or compensation, hollowing out the very public square they claim to serve.

“Their hijacking of the public square is made possible by the original sin that animates their AI products — a brazen theft of intellectual property that has occurred at an unprecedented scale,” Sulzberger said in prepared remarks. “Tech giants strip-mine news websites without permission or compensation. They repackage these stolen goods as their own, siphoning off the audiences and revenue that otherwise would go to the news organizations that created this work.”

Sulzberger laid out what he called the four ingredients of AI: talent, compute, energy, and data. The first three are paid for — engineers earn tens or hundreds of millions, data centers cost hundreds of billions. But “data,” Sulzberger argued, is treated differently, seized without consent or compensation despite being equally essential.

The tech industry’s justifications — that innovation requires it, that facts can’t be owned, that “fair use” permits it, that licensing deals take too long — don’t hold up, Sulzberger said. He noted that five of the top 10 sites used to train leading language models belong to news publishers, and that OpenAI has acknowledged it would be “impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.”

The financial stakes are enormous. The six leading AI companies have a combined valuation of $11 trillion — more than three times the GDP of France. Private AI investment in the U.S. reached nearly $350 billion in 2025. Yet industry data suggests less than half of 1 percent of that investment goes to compensate the publishers whose content powers the technology.

The impact on news organizations is already measurable. The largest newspapers tracked by Comscore saw traffic drop more than 45 percent on average as the AI race intensified over the last four years. Meanwhile, Meta alone now makes eight times more in ad revenue than every newspaper on earth combined.

“The tech giants are fully aware of the implications of this shift,” Sulzberger said, quoting a Microsoft executive who wrote that “the open web was built on an implicit value exchange where publishers made content accessible, and distribution channels helped people find it. That model does not translate cleanly to an AI-first world.”

The Times publisher was careful to position his remarks not as anti-AI. He noted the Times uses AI internally — “responsibly, ethically, and with humans making the decisions” — to improve how it reports and distributes journalism. “Holding a powerful new technology at arms length is a recipe for failure,” he said.

But he pushed back hard on the idea that paying for content would cripple American competitiveness. “In its competition with China, America weakens itself by abandoning the intellectual property protections that fuel innovation and power America’s creative enterprises,” he said.

Sulzberger acknowledged the irony of a 175-year-old newspaper criticizing tech disrupters. But he argued the AI situation is different: the companies aren’t being disrupted by new technology — they’re the ones doing the disrupting, and they’re doing it on the backs of creators they’ve refused to compensate.

He urged the assembled news leaders from more than 60 countries to be more vocal. “Our profession has been too quiet, too passive and too fragmented in the face of abuses by the companies leading the AI revolution,” he said.

The speech ended with a plea for news organizations to stand firm on their value — and to stop pretending information wants to be free. “Information is valuable. Journalism is valuable,” Sulzberger said. “We cannot afford to be as naive this time.”

Edited by Pete Pachal

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CNN has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity, according to the network, accusing the AI company of unlawfully copying and distributing the network’s journalism without permission.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, marks CNN’s first copyright action against an AI company, and is believed to be the first such suit filed by any television network. It alleges Perplexity scraped and redistributed CNN’s reporting to power its AI-powered search product.

According to the filing, CNN attempted to negotiate a content licensing deal with Perplexity last year but failed to reach agreement on terms.

“As a result, before and after Perplexity’s negotiations with CNN, Perplexity knew that it was not permitted to access CNN’s content or to use its trademarks or service marks,” the lawsuit states.

The network said it “actively embraces the opportunities AI creates” and has commercial partnerships with responsible industry players, including a publicly reported deal with Meta last December. But CNN drew a hard line with Perplexity.

“CNN’s lawsuit stands for the proposition that Perplexity, a company valued at tens of billions of dollars, should not be able to steal from entities that create the original content Perplexity exploits,” a CNN spokesperson said. “The public rely on high quality news journalism reported by human beings to understand their world, which is frequently dangerous and expensive to produce. Commercial operators can and must pay to make use of it.”

The statement added: “There is no free option.”

Perplexity faces similar legal challenges from other major publishers, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, News Corp, Encyclopedia Britannica, and the Japanese media company Yomiuri Shimbun. Publishers including Gannett, TIME, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel, however, have announced licensing deals with Perplexity during the same period.

In a statement, Perplexity pushed back on the premise. “You can’t copyright facts,” said Jesse Dwyer, the company’s chief communications officer.

Earlier this year, in a legal response to the Times and Tribune suits, Perplexity argued that attempts “to stop this novel technology by monopolizing facts will founder on bedrock principles of intellectual property law that have consistently permitted innovative technologies like Perplexity to exist.”

The CNN lawsuit escalates a broader confrontation between news publishers and AI companies over compensation for content used to train and power generative AI tools. Publishers have largely pursued a two-track approach: suing some AI firms while striking licensing deals with others.

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Scott Turow, the bestselling author of “Presumed Innocent,” has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta. And he’s brought along half of the publishing industry.

Turow and his company S.C.R.I.B.E. joined forces with Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage to file a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs allege Meta built its Llama language model by copying millions of copyrighted books and journal articles, with direct authorization from CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The complaint claims Meta “briefly considered licensing deals with major publishers” but reversed course in April 2023 after the question was escalated to Zuckerberg. A Meta employee is quoted in the filing as saying: “If we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into the fair use strategy.”

The lawsuit cites specific works including Turow’s “Presumed Innocent,” Douglas Preston’s “Impact,” Peter Brown’s “The Wild Robot,” N.K. Jemisin’s “The Fifth Season,” and Lemony Snicket’s “Who Could That Be at This Hour?” The class could include authors with registered copyrights on books with ISBNs or journal articles with DOIs or ISSNs.

“All Americans should understand that the bold future promised by A.I., has been, to paraphrase the investigative writer Alex Reisner, created with stolen words,” Turow said in a statement to NPR. “It is all the more shameful that these violations of the law were undertaken by one of the richest corporations in the world.”

Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger called it “the most flagrant copyright breach in history.” The plaintiffs are seeking statutory damages, a permanent injunction, and an order requiring Meta to destroy all infringing copies.

Meta pushed back sharply. “AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use,” said Nkechi Nneji, a Meta public affairs director. “We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”

The case enters a complicated legal landscape. A federal judge dismissed a different group of authors’ copyright claims against Meta last June, finding the plaintiffs didn’t present enough evidence of harm. But Anthropic settled with publishers for $1.5 billion last September after a ruling that the company had copied millions of books without consent or compensation.

Whether Turow’s case can distinguish itself from Meta’s previous win — and overcome the “fair use” defense — will be the central question.

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The New York Times filed a federal lawsuit against Perplexity on Friday, accusing the AI search startup of repeatedly violating its copyrights despite 18 months of demands to stop.

The suit, filed in New York, claims Perplexity’s search engine grabbed large chunks of Times content, including entire articles, to generate responses for users. The Times argues this directly competes with its own offerings.

“Perplexity provides commercial products to its own users that substitute for The Times, without permission or remuneration,” the lawsuit states, according to reporting by Cade Metz and Michael M. Grynbaum in The New York Times.

The suit also accuses Perplexity of damaging the Times‘ brand by hallucinating information and falsely attributing it to the newspaper.

Perplexity dismissed the lawsuit. “Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media and now A.I.,” Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity’s head of communication, told the Times. “Fortunately, it’s never worked, or we’d all be talking about this by telegraph.”

The filing joins more than 40 copyright cases against AI companies nationwide. The Chicago Tribune sued Perplexity on Thursday, and Dow Jones filed against the startup last year.

Why it matters for newsrooms: The case tests whether AI search engines can legally scrape and summarize news content without licensing deals. Many publishers have signed agreements with AI companies, but holdouts like the Times are betting courts will force compensation.

In September, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to book authors and publishers after a judge ruled the company illegally downloaded copyrighted books. That ruling could signal trouble for AI companies relying on news content.

The Times struck its first AI licensing deal with Amazon in May. Financial terms were not disclosed.

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