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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The latest turn in the Dow Jones and New York Post case against Perplexity is less about one chatbot answer than about how copyright evidence gets built in the AI era. According to Press Gazette, Perplexity is asking the court to force the publishers to turn over records showing the prompts they used to test its system before filing suit.

Perplexity’s argument is blunt. In a filing quoted by Press Gazette, the company said, “This discovery would reveal an inconvenient truth: Plaintiffs repeatedly and deceptively crossed the line from investigation to entrapment.” In other words, Perplexity is not just denying infringement. It is arguing that the publishers tried to engineer failure conditions to make a stronger case.

That matters because publisher lawsuits against answer engines and generative AI tools often depend on showing that a system can reproduce or closely mimic protected reporting. If courts start scrutinizing how those tests were constructed, the evidentiary playbook for future cases could get more complicated.

Press Gazette reported that Dow Jones and the New York Post oppose producing the prompt records, arguing they are protected attorney work product created in anticipation of litigation. The dispute now sits at an awkward but important junction: publishers want to demonstrate copying while AI companies want room to argue that the tests did not reflect normal user behavior.

The prompt-log fight could matter beyond Perplexity

The legal issue here is narrow, but the industry implication is broad. AI companies have spent months insisting that many public examples of harmful output, hallucinations or copyright problems come from adversarial prompting. Publishers, for their part, have strong incentives to probe systems hard because casual use may not expose the outer edge of reproduction risk.

Press Gazette described one example in which Perplexity summarized a Wall Street Journal article but refused a request to reproduce part of it verbatim. The chatbot response quoted by the publication said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t provide the exact text from the article. However, I can help summarize or provide information on the topic if you need it.” That example supports Perplexity’s broader point that the system may resist some direct copying requests. But it does not settle whether other prompts produced output that went too far.

For publishers, that is the danger in this stage of the litigation cycle. Courts may begin asking not only what the chatbot returned, but how many tries it took, what sequence of prompts got there and whether those prompts resembled ordinary use. That is a harder factual record to present cleanly than a simple side-by-side reproduction claim.

Why newsroom leaders should care

This case is not just another skirmish in the running AI copyright war. It could influence how publishers and newsroom counsel document future complaints against search-answer and RAG-style products.

If Perplexity succeeds in forcing disclosure of prompt logs, plaintiffs may have to assume their testing methods will be examined in detail. That could make legal teams more rigorous about documenting why a prompt sequence was reasonable and how closely it matched actual user behavior. It could also give AI defendants a repeatable strategy: shift the discussion from output alone to the testing design behind the output.

There is still an important unknown here. Press Gazette’s report leaves open whether the judge will require disclosure of the prompt records. Until that happens, the case remains a procedural fight with larger implications rather than a clear substantive win for either side.

But the underlying issue is not going away. As publishers try to prove that AI systems copied their work, and AI companies argue that plaintiffs had to game the system to show it, courts will increasingly be asked to decide where legitimate investigation ends and manufactured evidence begins. That line could matter almost as much as the copying question itself.

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OpenAI is rolling out advertising in ChatGPT, but the dozens of publishers who signed content licensing deals with the company won’t see a cent of the ad revenue.

The company announced last week that ads will begin appearing for U.S. users on free accounts and the new $8/month ChatGPT Go tier. Paid Pro, Business and Enterprise subscriptions remain ad-free.

The Information reported that OpenAI has already pitched the placements to dozens of advertisers. The model is pay-per-view rather than pay-per-click, with ads appearing below ChatGPT’s responses — not within them.

The contrast with Perplexity is striking. The AI search startup launched its Publishers’ Program in 2024, offering revenue sharing when a publisher’s content is referenced in an ad-supported interaction. Perplexity later expanded this with Comet Plus, which pays publishers for traffic from its AI browser.

OpenAI has made no similar commitment. Publishers including The Atlantic, Vox Media, Axel Springer and others signed licensing deals that give OpenAI access to their content for model training and real-time retrieval. Those deals cover content access — not a share of downstream advertising revenue.

“Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you,” OpenAI wrote in its announcement. “We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data.”

The move represents a reversal from CEO Sam Altman’s earlier stance. “Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me,” he said at a Harvard Business School talk in May 2024. “I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us.”

With over 800 million weekly active users, ChatGPT’s free tier represents significant monetization potential. For publishers watching their traffic decline as users get answers without clicking through, the lack of revenue sharing adds insult to injury.

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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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