CNN has filed a federal lawsuit against the artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI, an escalation in the dispute between news publishers and generative AI platforms that scrape original reporting without permission or compensation.
According to a complaint filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the Warner Bros. Discovery-owned network accuses the "answer engine" of copying more than 17,000 CNN stories, videos, and images. The filing says the two parties failed to reach a content-licensing agreement last year, and that Perplexity then proceeded to use the content to build its platform.
A CNN spokesperson said in a statement that Perplexity "should not be able to steal from entities that create the original content." Perplexity spokesperson Jesse Dwyer dismissed the lawsuit, saying, "You can't copyright facts."
