Perplexity AI’s legal chief Nathan Barksdale says the $20 billion startup won’t be “bullied” by the wave of copyright lawsuits hitting the artificial intelligence industry, a defiant stance that extends beyond intellectual property battles to fights with established tech giants including
The AI-driven search engine currently faces three copyright lawsuits from
The onslaught, largely from authors and publishers, is “expected when you have a multi-generational industry that’s being, in their mind, upended by these AI companies,” Barksdale said during a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg Law at Perplexity’s San Francisco office.
“But we don’t want to be bullied for the sake of it,” he said in one of the company’s conference rooms, flanked by Fiji bottled water and a scribble-filled white board. “So we will stand up for our right to the company, rights for users,” he said. “And sometimes that creates unusual legal scenarios where we have to push the boundaries.”
The company’s fervent approach has been on full display the last two weeks. After Perplexity accused Reddit of extortion when the social media platform compared the startup to a “North Korean hacker” in a copyright dispute, on Tuesday it called Amazon’s demand to stop its AI browser agent from making purchases a “bully tactic.”
The cases are among dozens filed against the emergent AI industry since 2022 over whether bot-makers require consent before feeding troves of copyrighted data into machine-learning models.
Barksdale insists the cases against Perplexity come from a “technological misunderstanding” of how the search engine differs from AI model training. Unlike rivals
“People are looking at AI like it’s just one thing and that is not the case,” he said.
Reddit Fight
Barksdale became Perplexity’s head of legal in 2024 after working at crypto marketplace OpenSea, Uber, and Viacom. Highlights from his first year include creating the term sheet for Perplexity’s $34.5 billion attempt to purchase Google’s Chrome and defeating two trademark infringement lawsuits.
Barksdale said Perplexity responds to copyright claims by talking to potential plaintiffs about how its product actually works—indexing content just like any other search engine. The company has avoided multiple disputes this way, he said.
Reddit’s October lawsuit accusing the startup of circumventing copyright protections to scrape years of content, though, is different because it focuses on user-generated content.
Under Reddit’s terms of service, users retain copyright ownership of their posts but allow the company to license content to train AI models. Reddit in 2024 struck licensing agreements worth $203 million with companies including OpenAI and
“I look at myself as a Reddit user, and I see what Reddit is doing and trying to maximize their profitability,” Barksdale said. “That’s not necessarily the rights that I provided.”
When Barksdale was asked what caused him to issue a statement about the Reddit lawsuit but not the others, Perplexity’s head of communications jumped in, unprompted. “Publishers who believe they have legitimate copyright claims should be ashamed to be associated with Reddit’s lawsuit,” said Jesse Dwyer, because it’s “fundamentally against its own principles of an open internet.”
Barksdale said “Perplexity by no means has this position of ‘let’s be aggressive in all respects,’” but it’s committed to a legal position and “we’re going to see it through.”
A Reddit spokesperson said the platform has always been open to humans, never to bots or scrapers. Allowing nefarious parties to scrape content without guardrails undermines trust and deters contributing, they added in an emailed statement.
The other plaintiffs didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Perplexity’s defiance is evident in legal maneuvers, including petitioning the US Patent and Trademark Office to invalidate a patent owned by a software company accusing the company of trademark infringement and moving to cancel a different trademark for fraud.
What’s Next?
Barksdale said he tracks all of the lawsuits against AI companies, with deep dives into each case, to ensure he knows where the industry-wide litigation stands.
That includes Anthropic’s record $1.5 billion copyright class-action settlement with authors and publishers whose books were part of a pirated database the AI company downloaded. It’s “good” the deal sets a potential price per work for AI companies, Barksdale said, though “the facts of the case are so different” that its influence on the types of claims Perplexity faces is less clear.
The company isn’t completely against licensing content, though. It announced a multi-year deal with Getty Images on Oct. 31 that allows the startup to display Getty’s content across its AI-powered tools.
The collaboration “unlocks more than what fair use alone can provide,” Barksdale said, by enabling Perplexity to curate more visual elements and deliver a more integrated experience to users. It’s widely recognized that fair use rights apply to certain displays of images on the internet, he said, but the partnership isn’t about asserting rights but rather “raising the bar for creativity throughout our products.”
The cost of the deal hasn’t been publicly disclosed.
Other partnerships will provide exposure, with sources being cited more frequently in responses to user queries, Barksdale said.
“A lot of these partners are going to see that limiting distribution is not ultimately the goal of anyone,” he said. “The more content is out there, the more ways it can be accessed, it’s better for everyone.”
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