CNN Files Latest News Copyright Suit Against Perplexity AI (1)

Cable News Network Inc. hit Perplexity AI Inc. with a lawsuit alleging the artificial intelligence company violated federal copyright law by copying more than 17,000 CNN stories, videos, images, and other content to power its products and tools.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, says that Perplexity “unlawfully crawls, scrapes, copies, and distributes CNN’s content” from CNN and third-party platforms to build an AI-first search index to provide CNN’s content in real time as input to large language models to formulate responses to users’ prompts.

It also claims the tool violates trademark law by falsely claiming a connection to CNN and at times falsely attributing erroneous “hallucinations” to the news giant.

CNN’s lawsuit comes six months after The New York Times and Chicago Tribune raised similar claims under the Copyright Act against Perplexity. In March, the AI company asked a federal court to toss claims brought over it AI search engine.

The three suits, all brought by the law firm Roth Figg Ernst & Manbeck PC, highlight the particular threat AI search tools pose to news outlets. They all claim Perplexity promoted itself as a substitute for the news outlet with a “skip the clicks” tagline, suggesting bypassing the creators of the information Perplexity relays. Research indicates AI bots lead to more than 95% less referral traffic than a traditional search, they say, due to them providing detailed answers to specific questions.

CNN’s complaint—also like the Times and Tribune complaints—points to Perplexity’s Publishers Program through which it shares revenue with some publishers, but not CNN. While painting itself as going further than other tech companies to share revenue, it still infringes and steals content in the absence of an agreement, they all said.

Perplexity spokesperson Jesse Dwyer pushed back on the CNN complaint in a short statement.

“You can’t copyright facts,” Dwyer wrote.

Its March motion to dismiss the Times and Tribune suits said the outlets failed to alllege any facts to support 3,234 of 3,240 works asserted in the suit and provided just 11 examples of AI outputs that contain substantially similar outputs. It also attributed any infringement to user behavior produced by specific user prompts, not any volitional conduct by Perplexity.

In October 2024, News Corp. subsidiary Dow Jones & Co. and the New York Post also brought similar copyright and trademark claims against Perplexity. Perplexity’s answer in that case said “compiling copyrighted content to create a searchable database” has long been deemed fair use under US copyright law. It also said merely citing sources doesn’t suggest an affiliation with the outlets’ customers.

Reddit as well as Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., and Merriam-Webster Inc. likewise brought a pair of suits based on Perplexity’s data scraping last fall.

The case is Cable News Network, Inc. v. Perplexity AI, Inc., S.D.N.Y., No. 1:26-cv-04427, complaint filed 5/28/26.