GoKawiilThe television network CNN is taking aim at the artificial intelligence search engine Perplexity in a lawsuit over copyright infringement. As reported by the network's Brian Stetler, the suit, filed Thursday in a New York District Court, accuses the AI company of copying and distributing CNN's content, including over 17,000 of CNN's stories, videos, images and other published works.
Though this is CNN's first legal case against an AI company, the network joins other publishers who have sued the San Francisco-based startup, including the New York Times and News Corp. According to the suit, CNN attempted to strike a licensing deal with Perplexity, but those talks didn't result in an agreement. CNN previously made a content licensing deal with Meta last year, where the tech giant compensates the media company for using its reporting and content to respond to queries on Meta AI.
AI products regularly scrape news publications and websites to answer user questions with real-time data, accelerating the collapse in traffic and revenue to original sources.
In response to the lawsuit, Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity's chief communications officer, told Stetler and other media outlets in a statement: "You can't copyright facts." The US government's Copyright Office states: "Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed."
CNN said in its own statement that a company valued at tens of billions of dollars shouldn't "steal from entities that create the original content Perplexity exploits" and that "commercial operators can and must pay to make use of it."
A Perplexity representative didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
AI copyright suits
Perplexity is one of several companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, that have been battling news publishers and media giants over copyright claims.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
More than 100 such lawsuits have been filed. But different conclusions have been reached as to whether training AI models on copyrighted data counts as fair use, said Michael Goodyear, an associate professor at New York Law School. Considerations include how the training occurs, what AI outputs contain and whether there's any competitive harm to copyright holders.
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