Perplexity Built a News Service on Journalism It Never Paid For
What happened
In December 2025, the Chicago Tribune filed a federal lawsuit against Perplexity AI, accusing the company of "brazen" and "systemic" copyright infringement. The suit alleged that Perplexity's answer engine and its Comet browser used Retrieval-Augmented Generation to bypass paywalls, scrape millions of copyrighted articles, and generate summaries that kept users on Perplexity's platform rather than sending them to the original source.
The Tribune's core claim was not simply that Perplexity read its journalism. It was that Perplexity reproduced it, generating "substantially similar" or verbatim summaries of investigative reporting and exclusive content without a license, without compensation, and without directing readers back to the outlets that paid to produce the work. The effect, the suit argued, was to capture the commercial value of journalism while routing the resulting traffic and advertising revenue to Perplexity itself. A separate trademark count alleged that when the system produced hallucinated or inaccurate summaries and attributed them to Tribune reporting, it damaged the paper's reputation for accuracy, attaching falsehoods to a brand built over more than a century.
By December 2025, Perplexity was facing parallel suits from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Post. The Tribune filing was notable for its additional allegation that Perplexity had taken deliberate steps to conceal the scope of its crawling activity, including bypassing robots.txt files and circumventing digital gatekeepers like Cloudflare. That pattern framed the suit as something broader than a licensing dispute: a challenge to whether an AI company could build a commercially valuable product on unlicensed content and describe it as routine indexing.
The stakes extended beyond any single outlet. If an answer engine can satisfy a user's query by reproducing a newspaper's findings without sending the user to the paper, it siphons the advertising revenue and subscription traffic that fund the next investigation. The journalism that trained and continues to power these systems depends on newsrooms that can cover their costs. A ruling against the publishers would entrench a model where the product of expensive, human-led reporting is freely repackaged for someone else's platform.
The deeper problem the litigation exposed is the absence of any external record of what the system actually ingested, when it ingested it, and what it reproduced to which users. Publishers could describe the behavior from their own traffic logs and from testing the product, but they could not produce a system-side log of which articles were scraped, how many times, or how closely the outputs tracked the originals. A provable record of what a system did, stored alongside the outputs it generated, would not have prevented the scraping, but it would have made the scope of the harm quantifiable from the start rather than subject to litigation-driven discovery.
Reported impact
- Affected parties
- Not publicly disclosed
- Harm type
- Not publicly disclosed
- Scale
- Not publicly disclosed
- Financial impact
- Not publicly disclosed
- Regulatory action
- Not publicly disclosed
Classification
Relevant governance controls
Governance control mapping is not available for this record.
- No controls mapped
Not publicly disclosed
Control mapping is analytical. It does not state that any control would have prevented the incident.
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index. The event is also catalogued in the following database, which is listed for cross-reference.