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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