NYT Sues 'Answer Engine' Perplexity Over AI Content Theft, Trademarks

• The New York Times has sued AI startup Perplexity, accusing its "answer engine" of illegally copying and repurposing millions of NYT articles, videos, and podcasts.
• NYT claims Perplexity's business model relies on scraping its paywalled content to produce responses that directly substitute for the newspaper's offerings, depriving it of revenue.
• The lawsuit also alleges trademark violation under the Lanham Act, citing Perplexity's "hallucinations" falsely attributed to The Times, which damage its brand credibility.
• Perplexity defends itself by stating it indexes webpages and provides citations, not scraping for core models, and dismisses the lawsuit as a common publisher tactic against new tech.
• This case is part of a broader legal conflict between content creators and generative AI developers, with similar lawsuits involving NYT, OpenAI, Microsoft, and other publishers against Perplexity.

Why It Matters: This lawsuit will define AI's use of copyrighted content, impacting future of publishing.